Principal Engineer
Principal Engineer
> ROLE OVERVIEW
As a Sr. Principal Engineer for k0rdent, you will set the technical direction across the entire k0rdent engineering department — spanning core k0rdent, AI Infrastructure, and AI Applications. You are the most senior individual contributor in the organization and the technical counterpart to the engineering leadership team. You will own end-to-end architectural coherence across these three areas, ensuring that the platform they collectively produce is greater than the sum of its parts: a unified, production-grade system for running modern and AI workloads on Kubernetes at enterprise and service provider scale. This role is deeply technical and deliberately broad. You will write code, design systems, prototype the hardest problems, and resolve the architectural decisions. You will partner with the Director(s) of Engineering and Engineering Managers and across the department to translate product strategy into durable technical execution, and you will be the engineering organization's senior technical voice with customers, partners, and upstream communities.
> CORE RESPONSIBILITIES
- Own Cross-Departmental Technical Strategy: Define and evolve the multi-quarter technical roadmap for k0rdent as a whole. Ensure that decisions made in core k0rdent, AI Infrastructure, and AI Apps compose into a coherent platform rather than four parallel tracks.
- Architect Across Pillars: Lead the design of the highest-risk, cross-cutting components and contracts in the platform — the cluster and state management primitives in KCM/KSM, the GPU/accelerator and AI runtime layer in AI Infrastructure, the application and serving experience in AI Apps, and the telemetry, signal, and SLO surface in Observability.
- Critically examine the entire text for any mention of compensation, salary ranges, or hourly rates.
> HARD REQUIREMENTS & SPECS
- Provide cross-departmental technical leadership without direct supervisory authority.
- Mentor and grow Staff and Principal engineers across all three pillars (Core k0rdent, AI Infrastructure, AI Apps), raise the technical bar through architecture and code review, and serve as the department's senior technical representative in cross-functional, customer, and external forums.
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