Buoyant, the company behind Linkerd, is hiring a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead a senior engineering team building core Kubernetes service mesh infrastructure. This role is open to Staff/Principal Engineers, TLMs, or newer Engineering Managers who have strong technical leadership experience and want to move into hands-on management.

This is not a generic people-management role. The right person will be technically credible with senior infrastructure engineers and comfortable staying close to systems design, architecture, execution, and coaching.

This role is fully remote within US/Canada time zones, roughly UTC-8 to UTC-4.

Lead and coach a senior engineering team building Linkerd and core Kubernetes service mesh infrastructure. Stay close to technical design, architecture, roadmap tradeoffs, and execution. Help engineers make strong decisions around Kubernetes, networking, proxies, distributed systems, and cloud-native infrastructure. Partner with engineering/product leadership on priorities, planning, delivery, and technical direction. Create a high-trust, high-ownership engineering environment for senior infrastructure engineers. Balance hands-on technical credibility with people leadership, mentoring, and team execution.

Current technical depth in Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure. L4-L7 networking, proxy, and/or service mesh experience. Systems development background. Ability to read and reason about Go or Rust code. Experience leading, mentoring, or coaching highly technical engineers. Background as a Staff/Principal Engineer, TLM, or newer Engineering Manager close to hands-on engineering. Strong communication skills and comfort operating in ambiguity.

Strong signals include Linkerd, Envoy, Istio, Cilium, Kubernetes controllers/operators, mTLS, gRPC, HTTP/2, core network systems software, CNCF/open-source work, and cloud-native infrastructure products.

To express interest or refer someone, please contact Scott Deakin directly at scott@prcaz.com.

Company description: Buoyant is the company behind Linkerd, the open-source Kubernetes service mesh. Buoyant helps engineering teams run secure, reliable cloud-native infrastructure by providing Linkerd-based service mesh software, support, and expertise for Kubernetes environments.