Principal Kubernetes Software Engineer

Job Description: Principal Kubernetes Software Engineer - Palo Alto, CA

VMware by Broadcom is the leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions.

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is a full-stack Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform that provides a unified, self-service experience for deploying and managing virtual machines (VMs) and containers across on-premises and public cloud environments. It delivers consistent infrastructure and operations across a variety of clouds, enabling organizations to modernize their applications and optimize their cloud deployments. The Kubernetes Distribution team in VCF is focused on delivering up-to-date and secure Kubernetes and CNCF projects as packages for the vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) and vSphere Supervisor.

The Kubernetes Distribution team is looking for a Principal Kubernetes Engineer with deep expertise in Open Source Software (OSS) and Cloud-Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) contribution processes and community. The role is focused on Kubernetes internals, and other related projects. In this role, you will design and perform business-aligned contributions primarily for releases, security, manageability, scale, and integrations.

This position is ideal for engineers who are highly skilled in Go, familiar with Kubernetes technology and processes and passionate about talking about and building technology for our customers with a global community of open source engineers.

What are the primary needs, technical challenges, and problems you may be responsible for?

• Leverage common patterns to develop fixes and features for Kubernetes and CNCF projects
• Design customer-oriented and community-aligned features by building consensus through Key Enhancement Proposals (KEPs) or related open source contribution process
• Ensure explicit Kubernetes version and feature compatibility with continual improvements to automation, pipelines and testing
• Timely delivery of releases which meet SLAs, architecture, security, and compliance requirements
• Leverage your own credibility through community interactions and positive contributions
• Collaborate internally with stakeholders from product, security, infrastructure, and operations teams

Success in the Role: What are the performance goals over the first 6-12 months you will work toward completing?

Within your first six months:

• You're seen as an internal expert, advising and influencing across VCF
• You understand the vision, architecture, and data model of the VKS and Kubernetes Distributions
• You have familiarity with common Kubernetes interfaces for runtime, networking, storage, and resource management
• You have production experience with deploying additional packages
• You ensure different components and subsystems work well together
• You have an in-depth understanding of Kubernetes extensibility and reconciliation logic
• You will demonstratedly design, implement, test, and deploy services developed in Go
• You champion technologies that boost project speed and automation.
• You understand how to meet Broadcom and industry standards

After six months+:

• You're great at aligning future customer needs with community interests in technical areas
• You're a recognized technical and community leader across various projects
• You designed and got approval for a Kubernetes KEP
• You've consistently made an impact on upstream projects through your contributions to code, architecture, community management, and public representation
• You made available a new CNCF software component or had material impact for other features for VCF
• You define and implement process changes, helping to clear out technical debt and make architectural improvements
• You lead developer efficiency efforts and take personal ownership of improving the culture of innovation of the team
• You mentor fellow engineers in their role, and coaching them into influential voices in the department

What type of work will you be doing? What assignments, requirements, or skills will you be performing regularly?

As part of the Kubernetes Distribution team::

• Most of your time will be developing using Kubernetes controllers and patterns, mostly written in Go
• You will collaborate with a global community of engineers in various CNCF open source projects
• You will be responsible for delivering your code changes to open source projects and satisfying any requirements for contribution
• You'll work closely with management to understand priorities and advocate for them on the team.
• You will collaborate internally with set of stakeholders, leads, and team members to make projects or contributions available as features
• You'll be responsible for high-level epics and be asked to help define requirements and tangible deliverables. You will be expected to break down the work into individual work items that can be assigned to the team and lead in estimating and scoping.
• You will write automated tests to validate and secure critical customer functionalities.
• You will mentor junior engineers, providing technical leadership on complex problems, and contributing to plans for new product opportunities.
• You will identify key issues, anticipate problems, generate ideas to reduce costs and improve quality/efficiency, and proactively identify improvements to business processes and policies.
• You will take on-call responsibilities to triage, troubleshoot, and mitigate production issues.

Requirements:

• Kubernetes expertise and material engineering contribution to at least 1 CNCF project and various OSS projects
• Experience with one or more cloud platform architectures
• History of leading system software projects/teams.
• Good knowledge of distributed systems, databases, algorithms, data structures.
• Good verbal and written communication skills
• Bachelor's degree plus 12+ years of related experience or Master's degree plus 10+ years of related experience

Nice to haves:

• vSphere experience
• Extensive knowledge and experience using and delivering complex container, kernel, packaging, and operating system functionality.
• Operational knowledge of Kubernetes in production environments
• Material contribution to 2+ CNCF projects or Kubernetes SIG projects, ie.

• Kubernetes, Cluster API, ContainerD/RunC, Cluster Autoscaler, Metrics Server, ArgoCD, Certmanager, Flux, Gateway API, Etcd, Harbor, Helm, Istio, Jaeger, KEDA, Kubeadm, Kubeflow, Kuve-vip, Kyverno, OPA/Gatekeeper, Opentelemetry

Where is this role located?

• This role is located in Palo Alto, CA USA.

Additional Job Description: Compensation And Benefits The annual base salary range for this position is $127,100 - $226,000

This position is also eligible for a discretionary annual bonus in accordance with relevant plan documents, and equity in accordance with equity plan documents and equity award agreements.

Broadcom offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits package: Medical, dental and vision plans, 401(K) participation including company matching, Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP), Employee Assistance Program (EAP), company paid holidays, paid sick leave and vacation time. The company follows all applicable laws for Paid Family Leave and other leaves of absence.

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