Senior Software Engineer — Kubernetes Control Plane (Go and/or Rust)

Fully Remote — United States, Canada, or South America ONLY

Experience: 7+ years

About Buoyant

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

We're expanding our engineering team to build new cloud-native infrastructure products, including Kinference, our Kubernetes-native AI inference control plane.

You'll join a small, experienced engineering team working on Kubernetes, distributed systems, networking, and cloud-native infrastructure software, with significant architectural ownership.

The Opportunity

We're 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.

What You'll Do

• Design and develop production Kubernetes controllers, operators, CRDs, and reconciliation systems.

• Build Kubernetes-native control-plane software in Go and/or Rust.

• Develop integrations with Kubernetes APIs, watches/informers, and resource lifecycle management.

• Engineer distributed infrastructure software with a focus on performance, scalability, reliability, and correctness.

• Solve complex problems involving networking, security, and AI inference infrastructure.

• Own engineering features from design and implementation through production deployment and maintenance.

• Contribute to open-source projects, design discussions, and code reviews.

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building production systems.

• Direct, hands-on experience personally developing production Kubernetes controllers/operators, CRDs, and reconciliation loops.

• Strong professional software development skills in Go and/or Rust.

• Deep understanding of Kubernetes API machinery, desired-state reconciliation, watches/informers, and resource lifecycle management.

• Experience designing, debugging, and maintaining complex distributed systems.

• Demonstrated ownership of substantial software components from design through production.

• Ability to work independently and collaboratively within a distributed engineering team.

Professional Rust experience is highly desirable but not required. Exceptional Go engineers with substantial Kubernetes controller development experience are encouraged to apply.

Highly Desirable Experience

• Kubebuilder, controller-runtime, client-go, or kube-rs.

• Versioned CRDs, admission webhooks, Gateway API, and multicluster Kubernetes.

• Kubernetes-native software 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 contributions.

What Does Not Qualify on Its Own

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

• Managing Kubernetes clusters using EKS, GKE, or AKS.

• Deploying applications or administering Kubernetes infrastructure.

• Helm, Terraform, GitOps, CI/CD, or infrastructure monitoring.

• Installing, configuring, or operating existing Kubernetes operators.

• General backend API development without direct Kubernetes controller/operator implementation.

We're 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.

Fully remote, requiring at least five hours of daily overlap with Pacific Time business hours.

U.S. and Canadian applicants must already have authorization to work in their respective countries without employer immigration sponsorship.

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

Please complete our brief application form and upload your resume.

Apply here: https://tally.so/r/dbN9bD

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

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.