Staff Engineer - vSphere Kubernetes Service

Job Description

Enterprises want to run Kubernetes at scale – without becoming Kubernetes experts.

Today, many Broadcom customers run mission‑critical workloads on vSphere, but adopting Kubernetes often means:

• Operating a second control plane
• Stitching together storage, networking, identity, and lifecycle tooling
• Carrying ongoing operational and upgrade risk

This complexity slows adoption and creates reliability issues at scale.

Our mission: make Kubernetes boring and effectively disappear for enterprise operators – by embedding it directly into the vSphere control plane and making it behave like a first‑class infrastructure primitive.

You’ll join the VKS team, responsible for the Kubernetes control plane that is built into VMware Cloud Foundation.

Your job is to design and build a distributed management system that:

• Runs Kubernetes control planes reliably across thousands of enterprise environments
• Manages the full lifecycle of Kubernetes workload clusters
• Integrates deeply with storage, networking, identity, and VM infrastructure
• Preserves enterprise guarantees around availability, upgrades, and operability

This is platform engineering at scale, with real production impact to 1000s of enterprise customers.

• How do we manage Kubernetes clusters as infrastructure, not pets?
  Designing control‑plane workflows that create, upgrade, and heal clusters safely.

• How do we reconcile Kubernetes abstractions with vSphere primitives?
  Bridging containers and VMs without leaking complexity to operators.

• How do we build a control plane that survives real enterprise failure modes?
  Partial upgrades, split‑brain scenarios, networking failures, and version skew.

• How do we test distributed systems rigorously?
  Building automated tests that validate correctness, upgrades, and resilience.

• Design and implement distributed systems in Go / C++ / Java
• Serve as a technical mentor and lead for a group of engineers, providing day‑to‑day technical direction and coaching to ensure successful project delivery.
• Drive and lead team processes and agile methodologies (sprint planning, execution, defect triages, etc.) to optimize quality and velocity for their assigned work.
• Own the complete Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) for assigned technical areas, including design, implementation, and quality assurance.
• Work with Technical Leads (TLs) and architects to translate ambiguous, large‑scale problems into clear technical designs and execution plans.
• Collaborate with Product Management and other engineering teams to manage technical dependencies, risks, and communications.
• Foster a culture of technical excellence, accountability, and continuous improvement.

• Hands‑on experience building or operating Kubernetes‑based systems. A deep understanding of the control plane architecture (API server, etcd, scheduler, controller‑manager, etc.) and how they maintain the desired state is required.
• Experience extending the Kubernetes API by designing declarative APIs and implementing reconciliation loops.
• Knowledge of Linux internals (cgroups, name spaces, etc.) and container runtimes like containerd.
• Knowledge of Container Network Interfaces (CNI) and managing traffic through Ingress controllers and Service Meshes (Istio, Linkerd etc.).
• Knowledge in Container Storage Interface (CSI) and managing Persistent Volumes (PVs) and PVCs.
• Strong systems design fundamentals (consistency, availability, failure handling)
• Comfort debugging production issues across multiple layers
• Ability to work independently on complex problems and collaborate across teams
• Experience working in an Agile environment using Git‑based workflows
• Bachelor’s degree plus 8+ years of related experience or Master’s degree and 6+ years of related experience

• You’re leading the development of core infrastructure, not app‑level glue.
• The problems are deeply technical and require strategic leadership to solve.
• Your work and your team’s success directly affect enterprise production environments.
• You’ll help define how Kubernetes is delivered…