Principal Software Engineer - Compute (Kubernetes)

About the Role

We are seeking a visionary Principal Software Engineer to join our Compute organization and provide technical leadership for our Kubernetes infrastructure. You will drive the evolution of a platform that powers our global scale operations, transforming Kubernetes into a secure, reliable, and invisible foundation for our developers across our on-prem and public cloud fleet. Your mission is to balance cutting-edge innovation with rigorous platform stability, ensuring that internal and external customers have a seamless, high-performance experience at massive scale.

Responsibilities

• Architectural Leadership: Serve as a technical lead for our Kubernetes ecosystem, setting the long-term architectural strategy for a platform that manages thousands of nodes and supports millions of concurrent requests.
• Customer Focus: Think deeply about how our internal customers consume and interact with compute, designing intuitive interfaces and tooling that simplify consumption of complex infrastructure services.
• Deep-Dive Engineering: Leverage deep expertise in Kubernetes internals, including custom controllers, operators, API server architecture, and etcd, to solve complex scaling bottlenecks and optimize our control plane.
• Secure Multi-tenancy: Architect robust security, isolation, and identity solutions that allow diverse workloads to safely coexist at scale.
• Operational Excellence: Lead the design of advanced automation, observability, and self-healing systems that minimize MTTR and maintain world-class uptime for our global compute fleet.
• Strategic Influence: Partner with engineering leadership to define the technical roadmap, balancing feature velocity against platform integrity.
• Mentorship: Foster a culture of technical excellence across the Compute organization through rigorous architectural reviews, code standards, and the active mentorship of senior and staff-level engineers.

Qualifications

• Experience: 10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, platform engineering, or cloud infrastructure.
• Kubernetes Expertise: Demonstrated expertise in Kubernetes internals, with a track record of modifying or extending the Kubernetes ecosystem (custom controllers, operators, upstream contributions).
• Production Scale: A history of building and operating mission-critical infrastructure platforms that serve thousands of nodes or high-throughput, low-latency microservices.
• Security & Networking: Deep understanding of cloud-native security practices, identity solutions, and container networking.
• Technical Leadership: Proven track record as a technical anchor, with the ability to communicate complex concepts, influence cross-functional stakeholders, and lead initiatives across multiple teams.

Work Arrangement

Roles based in an office are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday.