Senior / Staff Software Engineer

Role overview A senior individual contributor role on a small, remote-first engineering team building a minimal, immutable Linux operating system for Kubernetes and a SaaS platform for managing fleets of those machines at scale. The position owns the architecture of a specific subsystem end-to-end, from technical proposal through production operation, with evaluation tied to technical judgment rather than people management.

Responsibilities - Design, build, and evolve a specific subsystem of the Linux OS or fleet management platform from proposal through production. - Author architecture and design documents and drive their adoption through technical credibility rather than organizational authority. - Tackle deep, cross-stack root-cause work spanning the Linux kernel, container runtimes, distributed consensus, the Kubernetes control plane, and virtualization internals. - Raise engineering quality through rigorous code review, RFC feedback, and pairing with other engineers in a mentorship-without-management capacity. - Serve as the final technical decision-maker within your area of ownership.

Requirements - Six or more years of professional software engineering experience with deep, hands-on expertise in Go. - A track record of independently architecting a non-trivial system or component in production, not just contributing to one designed by someone else. - Deep Linux systems knowledge, including kernel internals, syscalls, cgroups, namespaces, or comparable low-level systems work. - Production experience with Kubernetes and the cloud-native control-plane stack (container runtime, distributed consensus) OR deep experience with virtualization internals such as KVM and libvirt. - Comfort making final technical calls in your domain without relying on managerial authority.

Nice to have - Writing Kubernetes controllers or operators, gRPC-based services, or virtualization tooling. - Prior open-source maintainer or significant-contributor experience.

Benefits and work setup - Remote position, preferably located in Santa Barbara, CA or Europe, with time-zone overlap either way. - Individual contributor track with no direct reports, joining a team of roughly ten engineers and reporting to the VP of Engineering. - Base salary of $130,000–$250,000 USD, depending on location and depth of relevant systems experience.