Senior Kubernetes Software Engineer

Senior Kubernetes Software Engineer – Palo Alto, CA

VMware by Broadcom is the leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions. VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is a full‑stack Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform that provides a unified, self‑service experience for deploying and managing virtual machines (VMs) and containers across on‑premises and public cloud environments. It delivers consistent infrastructure and operations across a variety of clouds, enabling organizations to modernize their applications and optimize their cloud deployments.

The Kubernetes Distribution team in VCF is focused on delivering up‑to‑date and secure Kubernetes and CNCF projects as packages for the vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) and vSphere Supervisor. The team is looking for a Principal Kubernetes Engineer with deep expertise in Open Source Software (OSS) and Cloud‑Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) contribution processes and community.

Key Responsibilities

• Leverage common patterns to develop fixes and features for Kubernetes and CNCF projects.

• Design customer‑oriented and community‑aligned features by building consensus through Key Enhancement Proposals (KEPs) or related open source contribution processes.

• Ensure explicit Kubernetes version and feature compatibility with continual improvements to automation, pipelines and testing.

• Timely delivery of releases which meet SLAs, architecture, security, and compliance requirements.

• Leverage your own credibility through community interactions and positive contributions.

• Collaborate internally with stakeholders from product, security, infrastructure, and operations teams.

Success in the Role – First 6–12 Months

• Seen as an internal expert, advising and influencing across VCF.

• Understands the vision, architecture, and data model of the VKS and Kubernetes Distributions.

• Familiar with common Kubernetes interfaces for runtime, networking, storage, and resource management.

• Has production experience with deploying additional packages.

• Ensures different components and subsystems work well together.

• Has an in‑depth understanding of Kubernetes extensibility and reconciliation logic.

• Demonstrated design, implementation, testing, and deployment of services developed in Go.

• Champions technologies that boost project speed and automation.

• Understands how to meet Broadcom and industry standards.

Success in the Role – After Six Months+

• Great at aligning future customer needs with community interests in technical areas.

• Recognized technical and community leader across various projects.

• Designed and got approval for a Kubernetes KEP.

• Consistently made an impact on upstream projects through code, architecture, community management, and public representation.

• Made available a new CNCF software component or had material impact for other features for VCF.

• Defined and implemented process changes, helping to clear out technical debt and make architectural improvements.

Led developer efficiency efforts and took personal ownership of improving the culture of innovation.

• Mentored fellow engineers and coached them into influential voices in the department.

Typical Work

• Develop using Kubernetes controllers and patterns, mostly written in Go.

• Collaborate with a global community of engineers in various CNCF open source projects.

• Responsible for delivering code changes to open source projects and satisfying contribution requirements.

• Work closely with management to understand priorities and advocate for them on the team.

• Collaborate internally with stakeholders to make projects or contributions available as features.

• Responsible for high‑level epics, help define requirements, break down work into individual items, and lead estimation and scoping.

• Write automated tests to validate and secure critical customer functionalities.

• Mentor junior engineers and provide technical leadership on complex problems.

• Identify key issues, anticipate problems, generate ideas to reduce costs and improve efficiency.

• Take on‑call responsibilities to triage, troubleshoot, and mitigate production issues.

Requirements

• Kubernetes expertise and material engineering contribution…