Senior Principal Engineer

Join k0rdent as a Senior Principal Engineer, where you will set the technical direction for the entire engineering department, ensuring architectural coherence across core k0rdent, AI Infrastructure, and AI Applications. You will write code, design systems, and resolve architectural decisions while mentoring and growing staff and principal engineers. This role requires deep technical expertise, strong communication skills, and the ability to make decisions under uncertainty.

• Set the technical direction across the entire k0rdent engineering department, ensuring architectural coherence across core k0rdent, AI Infrastructure, and AI Applications.
• Provide cross-departmental technical leadership, mentoring and growing Staff and Principal engineers, and raising the technical bar through architecture and code review.
• Define and evolve the multi-quarter technical roadmap for k0rdent, ensuring that decisions made in core k0rdent, AI Infrastructure, and AI Apps compose into a coherent platform.

• Deep Technical Breadth: Expert-level proficiency across the surface area k0rdent covers — Kubernetes internals and cluster lifecycle, distributed systems, AI/ML workload runtimes (model serving, GPU scheduling, autoscaling under bursty inference traffic), and modern observability (metrics, logs, traces, SLOs). You don't need to be the deepest expert in all four, but you must be credible and effective in each
• Communication: Ability to explain complex technical tradeoffs clearly to engineers, executives, customers, and the broader community, in both writing and conversation
• Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: Strong judgment in fast-moving domains where the technology — particularly AI infrastructure — is evolving as quickly as the product
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Effective partnership with product management, design, sales engineering, and customer-facing teams across a broad portfolio
• Influence Without Authority: Track record of driving technical direction across multiple teams and organizations through clarity, credibility, and collaboration rather than reporting lines
• Business Judgment: Solid understanding of how engineering decisions translate into cost, revenue, and risk, and willingness to weight technical choices accordingly
• Technical Strategy: Ability to look two to three years ahead, identify the architectural decisions that matter most across a broad surface area, and sequence them against business reality
• Systems Architecture: Demonstrated ability to design large-scale, multi-tenant systems that span multiple subsystems and hold up under real production conditions, and to communicate those designs clearly in writing
• Mentorship: Demonstrated success developing senior engineers — Staff, Principal, and Tech Lead level — and raising the technical bar of an organization
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field or 10 years related experience
• At least five years in a technical leadership role preferred