Principal Kubernetes Engineer

CIQ OVERVIEW

CIQ builds the enterprise infrastructure that powers the world's most demanding workloads. From the operating system layer through AI infrastructure, high-performance computing, and cloud-native orchestration, CIQ delivers the speed, security, scalability, and sovereignty that major enterprises, government agencies, and research institutions depend on.

CIQ is the founding support and services partner of Rocky Linux and the developer of the RLC Pro family of Enterprise Linux distributions, Fuzzball workload orchestration, Warewulf Pro cluster provisioning, and Ascender Pro automation. Our customers include some of the largest and most technically sophisticated organizations in the world, working across HPC, AI/ML, defense, and regulated industries.

We are a company of builders, operators, and open source practitioners. If you want to do work that matters, at a company that is genuinely changing how enterprise infrastructure gets built and run, we want to talk.

POSITION SUMMARY

As a Principal Kubernetes Engineer, you will work within the Engineering department to design, develop, and support enterprise Kubernetes solutions by contributing to the products and infrastructure for CIQ. You will also maintain our systems' capacity and performance. You need to be able to troubleshoot and improve applications and processes. You’ll analyze current code and industry developments to design engineering solutions to solve problems and create seamless user experiences. Additional responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• Leading and participating in architecture-level discussions, planning, and
• implementation.
• Researching to ensure that what we are building is always the best path forward.
• Documenting projects to share knowledge and facilitate integration for users.
• Driving proof of concepts and minimum viable products for demonstration.
• Supporting multiple services before they go live through activities such as system design consulting, developing software platforms and frameworks, capacity planning, and launch reviews.
• Improving products by collaborating with Engineering teams, Product teams, Sales teams, and open-source communities (as needed) on optimal and relevant solutions while sharing knowledge.
• Designing and guiding solutions by filling the gap in ambiguous requirements.

NEEDED TO SUCCEED

Successful candidates will have:

• An understanding of Linux and Cloud infrastructure. 
• Deep, hands-on expertise with Kubernetes and the cloud-native ecosystem (operators and custom controllers, CRDs, Helm, the API machinery), plus strong Go, Pulumi, and related engineering tools. 
• A demonstrated mastery of Linux and cloud(AWS/Azure/GCP). 
• The ability to pivot to new challenges in a fast-paced startup environment. 
• Expertise in deriving solutions from high-level or incomplete requirements. 
• Strong problem-solving skills and an eagerness to learn.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• The ability to work independently and collaboratively in a remote team environment. 
• A friendly, collaborative, humble, honest, and always striving-to-be-better attitude.
• Flexibility to support an on-call rotation.

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE

• A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a similar field. 
• At least 10 years of software and infrastructure engineering experience, with deep expertise designing, building, and operating production Kubernetes and Go services at scale. 
• A demonstrated mastery of Linux and cloud(AWS/Azure/GCP). 
• Experience building Kubernetes operators, custom controllers, or a Kubernetes distribution is a plus.

BENEFITS

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.

• Flexible paid time off.

• Employee stock options.

• Remote work; no travel required for most positions.