Senior Software Engineer, Control Plane

Buoyant is the company behind Linkerd, the CNCF graduated service mesh for Kubernetes. We are a small, fully remote engineering team building a new cloud native infrastructure product.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer with strong experience in Kubernetes native software, distributed systems, networking, or related infrastructure. This is a hands on product engineering role with meaningful architectural ownership.

What you’ll do:

• Help design and build the control plane for a new cloud native infrastructure product • Develop reliable, production quality software in Go and/or Rust • Build Kubernetes native APIs, controllers, reconciliation systems and lifecycle management • Design systems that behave reliably through failures, retries, upgrades and changing state • Work on distributed systems, networking, security, authentication, authorization and service communication • Contribute to architecture and technical direction while remaining hands on with implementation • Build observability, testing, profiling and operational tooling • Collaborate closely with a small, senior engineering team and take significant ownership from design through production

What we’re looking for:

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally in infrastructure, distributed systems, networking or cloud native software • Strong experience with Go and/or Rust • Deep Kubernetes experience, including building software that integrates directly with Kubernetes • Experience with one or more of the following: controllers, operators, CRDs, reconciliation systems, Kubernetes APIs, admission webhooks, watches, informers or similar control plane systems • Strong understanding of distributed state, failures, retries, consistency and concurrency • Experience building production APIs or network services such as gRPC • Experience with security concepts such as authentication, authorization, RBAC, secrets or mTLS is valuable • Ability to work independently and take ownership of complex technical problems in a small remote team • Strong written and verbal communication skills

We do not expect every candidate to match every requirement. Strong distributed systems or Kubernetes engineers who can quickly develop deeper control plane expertise are encouraged to apply.

Location: Fully remote. Candidates are being considered in the U.S., Canada, South America and Europe with Central European Time compatible working hours.

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