Senior Software Engineer — Kubernetes Control Plane

Fully Remote — United States, Canada, or South America ONLY
Experience: 7+ years

IMPORTANT — PLEASE READ BEFORE APPLYING

We are seeking experienced software engineers who have personally designed and developed production Kubernetes controllers/operators, Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), and reconciliation loops.

This is a hands-on Kubernetes-native software product engineering position — NOT a DevOps, SRE, platform operations, or Kubernetes administration role.

Applicants must currently reside in the United States, Canada, or South America. Applications from other regions will not be considered for this posting.

About Buoyant

Buoyant is a privately held, profitable software company and the creator of Linkerd, the CNCF-graduated Kubernetes service mesh used in production infrastructure around the world.

We're expanding our engineering team to develop new cloud-native infrastructure products, including Kinference, our Kubernetes-native AI inference control plane. Kinference is designed to improve the routing, performance, and efficiency of AI inference workloads running on Kubernetes.

You'll join a small, experienced engineering organization working on challenging problems across Kubernetes, distributed systems, networking, and AI infrastructure.

This is an opportunity to help build new products from the ground up, influence technical architecture, and own substantial engineering work.

What You'll Do

• Design and implement production Kubernetes controllers, operators, CRDs, and reconciliation systems.
• Build high-performance Kubernetes-native control-plane software in Go and/or Rust.
• Develop integrations with Kubernetes APIs, resource lifecycle management, watches/informers, and distributed infrastructure.
• Engineer software that manages large numbers of distributed resources while maintaining performance, reliability, and correctness.
• Solve complex problems involving networking, distributed systems, security, and AI inference infrastructure.
• Own engineering features from architecture and implementation through production deployment, debugging, and maintenance.
• Contribute to open-source software, technical design discussions, and code reviews.

Required Qualifications — Must Have

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience developing production systems, distributed infrastructure, or cloud-native software products.
• Direct hands-on experience personally writing Kubernetes controllers/operators, CRDs, and reconciliation loops.
• Strong knowledge of Kubernetes API machinery, watches/informers, resource lifecycle management, and desired-state reconciliation.
• Strong professional software development skills in Rust and/or GO.
• Experience designing, debugging, and maintaining complex distributed systems in production.
• Demonstrated ownership of substantial software components from design through production.
• Strong communication skills and ability to work independently within a distributed engineering team.

Professional Rust experience is highly desirable but not required. Exceptional Go engineers with deep Kubernetes controller development experience and an interest in learning Rust are encouraged to apply.

Highly Desirable Experience

• Kubebuilder, controller-runtime, client-go, or kube-rs.
• Versioned CRDs, admission webhooks, Gateway API, and multi-cluster control planes.
• Kubernetes-native infrastructure software delivered as part of commercial products used by external customers.
• Service meshes, cloud networking, gateways, service discovery, and distributed configuration management.
• gRPC, TLS/mTLS, RBAC, authentication, and control-plane security.
• Performance profiling, benchmarking, and open-source infrastructure contributions.

What Does NOT Qualify on Its Own

The following experience is insufficient without substantial hands-on Kubernetes-native software development:

• Managing Kubernetes clusters using EKS, GKE, or AKS.
• Deploying containerized applications or configuring Kubernetes infrastructure.
• Helm, Terraform, GitOps, or CI/CD pipeline development.
• Installing, configuring, or operating existing Kubernetes operators.
• General backend API development without direct Kubernetes controller/operator implementation.

We are hiring engineers who BUILD software that extends Kubernetes — not engineers who simply USE Kubernetes.

Location and Employment Requirements

Eligible locations: United States, Canada, or South America ONLY.

This is a fully remote position requiring at least five hours of daily overlap with Pacific Time business hours.

U.S. and Canadian applicants must already be authorized to work in their respective countries without employer immigration sponsorship, now or in the future.

South American candidates may be considered under company-approved employment or independent-contractor arrangements.

Compensation includes a competitive base salary or approved contractor compensation, as applicable, plus stock options, subject to the terms of the arrangement.

How to Apply

Click the Apply button to complete our brief application form and upload your resume.

We're specifically looking for engineers who have personally developed production Kubernetes controllers/operators, CRDs, and reconciliation systems.

Applicants must currently reside in the United States, Canada, or South America.

The application takes approximately 2–3 minutes to complete.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Buoyant is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate against applicants because of race, religion, gender identity, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, marital status, military status, or any other characteristic protected by local law or ordinance.