Senior Software Engineer (Kubernetes/Go)

Location: Fully remote in the United States, Canada, or South America only; at least five hours of daily overlap with Pacific Time business hours required. Applicants must be eligible for an approved employment or contractor arrangement in their country of residence.

Company

Buoyant develops Linkerd and new cloud-native infrastructure products, including Kinference, a Kubernetes-native AI inference control plane.

What you will do

• Design and implement production Kubernetes controllers, operators, CRDs, and reconciliation systems.
• Develop Kubernetes API integrations using Go and/or Rust.
• Build resource lifecycle management, watches/informers, and distributed infrastructure software.
• Solve networking, scalability, reliability, and security challenges.
• Own engineering features and substantial software components from design through production.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Direct, hands-on experience personally developing production Kubernetes controllers/operators, CRDs, and reconciliation loops.
• Strong professional Go/Golang development experience, or equivalent Kubernetes-native product engineering experience in Rust.
• Knowledge of Kubernetes API machinery, watches/informers, desired-state reconciliation, and resource lifecycle management.
• Experience building, debugging, and maintaining distributed systems in production.
• Experience owning substantial software components from design through deployment.
• Professional Rust experience is desirable but not required; strong Go developers with deep Kubernetes controller/operator experience are encouraged to apply.
• Cluster management, application deployment, administration, operations, Helm, Terraform, GitOps, CI/CD, infrastructure monitoring, and general Go backend/API development without direct controller/operator implementation do not qualify on their own.

Nice to have

• Kubebuilder, controller-runtime, client-go, or kube-rs.
• Versioned CRDs, admission webhooks, Gateway API, and multi-cluster Kubernetes.
• Customer-facing Kubernetes-native software products.
• Service meshes, cloud networking, gateways, service discovery, and distributed configuration.
• gRPC, TLS/mTLS, RBAC, authentication, and performance engineering.
• Open-source infrastructure contributions.

Culture & Benefits

• Fully remote work across the United States, Canada, or South America.
• Small, experienced engineering team with significant technical ownership.
• Employment or contractor arrangement available when approved in the applicant's country of residence.
• Equal Opportunity Employer.