Buoyant, the company behind Linkerd, is hiring a Linkerd Control Plane Engineer to help build mission-critical cloud-native infrastructure used in production Kubernetes environments around the world.

This is a hands-on engineering role focused on control plane development at the intersection of Kubernetes, distributed systems, APIs, networking, security, and cloud-native infrastructure. The role can be scoped at the Senior, Staff, or Principal level depending on background.

You will work on Linkerd open source and Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd, helping design and implement high-performance, scalable, reliable control plane systems. This is a strong fit for engineers who have deep Kubernetes experience, strong Go skills, technical leadership ability, and comfort owning complex infrastructure work in a small, remote-first engineering team.

This role is fully remote and based in the United States or Canada.

Design and implement complex features across Kubernetes, network programming, distributed systems, and cloud-native infrastructure.

Build mission-critical, high-performance control plane software in Go.

Help ensure the performance, scalability, correctness, and maintainability of Linkerd’s control plane across large production environments.

Design and evolve Kubernetes APIs, CRDs, controllers, and related cloud-native infrastructure components.

Unblock difficult technical problems and help guide architectural decisions.

Collaborate with senior engineers, product leadership, and the CTO on technical direction, design tradeoffs, and execution.

Contribute to technical design documents, proposals, code reviews, postmortems, and engineering discussions.

Represent Buoyant and Linkerd through technical discussions, community engagement, and open-source-related work where applicable.

Strong software engineering experience developing systems-level, mission-critical infrastructure technologies.

Expert-level Go programming experience.

Deep Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure experience.

Strong experience designing versioned, extensible, declarative APIs, ideally using Kubernetes CRD best practices.

Experience designing, debugging, and operating complex distributed systems and networked applications in production.

Strong understanding of control plane architecture, scalability, correctness, and reliability.

Experience with RBAC, authentication/authorization, secrets management, or other security-sensitive control plane design areas.

Experience with performance profiling, benchmarking, observability, and large-scale production systems.

Strong technical leadership experience, including ownership of complex projects, mentoring, collaboration, and architectural guidance.

Excellent written communication skills and ability to work effectively in a fully remote team.

Helpful but not required: Rust, Linkerd, service mesh, gRPC, containers, mTLS, zero-trust principles, metrics pipelines, and cloud-native ecosystem integrations.

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.