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

Buoyant is the company behind Linkerd, the CNCF-graduated Kubernetes service mesh, and Kinference, our Kubernetes-native AI inference control plane.

We're seeking a Senior Software Engineer with hands-on experience building production Kubernetes-native software, particularly controllers, operators, Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), and reconciliation loops.

This is a software product engineering role, NOT a DevOps, SRE, Kubernetes administration, or infrastructure operations position.

Core requirements:

7+ years of professional software engineering experience.

Personally designed and implemented production Kubernetes controllers/operators, CRDs, and reconciliation systems.

Strong software development experience in Go and/or Rust.

Experience with Kubernetes APIs, resource lifecycle management, watches/informers, and desired-state reconciliation.

Experience building and maintaining production distributed systems.

Ability to own significant engineering components from architecture through deployment.

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

Experience with Kubebuilder, controller-runtime, client-go, kube-rs, Gateway API, admission webhooks, service meshes, and cloud-native networking is particularly valuable.

Important: Managing Kubernetes clusters, deploying applications, using Helm/Terraform, or configuring existing operators does not independently qualify someone for this position.

Location: Fully remote — United States, Canada, or South America only. At least five hours of daily overlap with Pacific Time business hours is required.

Please apply through our screening form: https://tally.so/r/dbN9bD

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.