Get the chrome extension Sr. Software Engineer - Stacklok Enterprise
Stacklok
Stacklok is led by CEO Craig McLuckie and CTO Joe Beda, two of the creators of Kubernetes. Kubernetes helped give enterprises more freedom over where and how they run software. Now we're bringing that same open approach to AI agents.
As AI agents take on more autonomous, long-running work, enterprises need infrastructure to run them securely and reliably at scale, without giving up control of their data, systems, or models. We're building open, Kubernetes-native infrastructure that brings together agent execution, secure access to tools and systems, and centralized controls for identity, permissions, and policy. This is an opportunity to help shape a foundational layer for enterprise AI while the architecture is still being defined.
We build in the open alongside the community. Our open source projects include ToolHive, an MCP platform that secures more than 20 million tool calls each month, and Mecatl, a cloud-native agent harness. Our commercial offering, Stacklok Enterprise, extends these capabilities with an AI gateway, centralized identity, policy enforcement, and observability.
Location
This is a remote role based in North America, with a strong preference for candidates located in the U.S. Eastern Time Zone.
The Opportunity
Enterprises are moving AI agents into production, and they want to run them the way they run everything else: on their own Kubernetes clusters, behind their firewall, and connected to the identity systems they already use. Stacklok Enterprise, our commercial platform for running and governing AI agents, is built for that, by a team whose founders co-created Kubernetes.
As a Senior Engineer on the core platform team, you will design and build major parts of the platform and own them from design through production. That work runs in customers' Kubernetes environments, so your design tradeoffs shape how the product holds up in the field. The areas you own will shift as the product grows, and you will mentor the engineers building alongside you.
Customers are onboarding now. As one of the key engineers helping them reach production, you will also work with some as design partners on our newest features and products. It is a high-ownership role in an emerging category, with a short path from customer feedback to what ships.
What Success Looks Like: First 6-12 Months
- Designed and shipped a complete subsystem end to end that is now running in production for enterprise customers.
- Helped take one or more customers from proof-of-concept to production on their own Kubernetes, and turned their feedback into a platform feature.
- Raised the team's bar by mentoring engineers and strengthening the product engineering culture.
- Improved how the team ships changes to customers, including where AI-assisted workflows helped and where they created rework.
- Became the owner and go-to decision maker for one or more platform areas, with the team routing design questions your way.
In This Role, You Will
- Own the design and implementation of platform subsystems in Stacklok Enterprise end to end, from technical design through production and ongoing improvement.
- Write production Go code for commercial software that runs reliably in customer Kubernetes environments, with observability, testing, and error handling built in.
- Make the design tradeoffs for the areas you own with product and engineering leadership, and mentor the engineers building alongside you.
- Work with customers to successfully operationalize the Enterprise Platform and turn their feedback into product improvements.
- Contribute to the open-source ToolHive codebase and collaborate with community contributors on shared work.
- Apply AI-assisted workflows and strengthen reusable tooling and playbooks so each engagement moves faster for the team.
Desired Skill & Experience
We do not expect every candidate to meet every point below. If this role excites you and you bring most of it, we encourage you to apply.
- Proficiency in Go, with a proven track record designing and shipping complete production-grade distributed systems as part of a commercial software product.
- Hands-on experience deploying and running applications on Kubernetes in production, ideally across different customer cloud environments, such as AWS, Azure and GCP.
- Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers, driving code review, and raising the quality of a team's work.
- Experience working directly with customers to onboard them and to debug the product, from diagnosing issues in their environments to driving fixes back into the codebase.
- AI-first mindset, with experience integrating AI tools into development practices and turning AI-assisted workflows into repeatable velocity gains for the team.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to explain complex technical ideas to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Startup mentality and intrinsic motivation, including a self-directed, hands-on approach and the ability to thrive in fast-moving, ambiguous environments.
Compensation: The anticipated base salary range for this position is $189,000 - $231,000. In addition to base salary, this role offers equity and a comprehensive benefits package.
Why Join Us?
At Stacklok, we believe great technology is built by teams that support, challenge, and inspire one another. We are AI maximalists, confident in AI’s potential and committed to building technology people can trust. We use AI in our own work and experiment openly.
You’ll build alongside people with deep experience in open source, cloud-native technologies, security, and developer tools. We stay close to customers, use our own products, and share what we learn to keep improving. You’ll have room to make decisions, support when you need it, and teammates who push themselves to do their best work.
We offer competitive compensation and equity, comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, and a flexible hybrid or remote work environment. Our benefits include flexible PTO, paid holidays, and paid parental leave, along with team offsites to collaborate and connect in person.
If you’re excited about what we’re building and want to work with people who care about their craft, community, and each other, we’d love to hear from you.
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Stacklok Inc, is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their, or any other person's, perceived or actual race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care status, or any other basis protected by law.
Originally posted on Himalayas
Senior Software Engineer - Virtual Machines (RD222)
Defense Unicorns
EMPLOYER IS A CONTRACTOR FOR THE U.S. GOVERNMENT. THIS POSITION REQUIRES U.S. CITIZENSHIP.
Role Description:
Defense Unicorns is building UDS VM, a new product that enables Mission Heroes to securely deploy, operate, and manage virtual machines alongside containerized workloads within the UDS platform.
Many mission-critical applications cannot easily move to containers because of operating system dependencies, vendor requirements, or existing approvals. Today, running these workloads on UDS often requires custom engineering. We’re building a supported, repeatable path for running VMs in secure, disconnected environments, with the security controls and evidence needed for authorization.
The work sits at the intersection of product software engineering, Kubernetes, virtualization, and security. We’re building software—not simply operating infrastructure—to make virtual machines first-class workloads within the UDS ecosystem.
As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll shape technical decisions, independently own complex product capabilities, and collaborate across engineering, product, and UX to deliver reliable, intuitive solutions. As this new team grows, you’ll help establish strong engineering practices; one of our Senior openings also offers an opportunity to provide hands-on technical leadership.
What You’ll Work On:
- Building Kubernetes tooling and APIs for orchestrating and managing virtual machine workloads
- Building tooling to inspect, convert, prepare, and package VM images for disconnected delivery
- Integrating virtual machine workloads with UDS networking, observability, and security capabilities
- Creating VM management workflows for inventory, status, power controls, and console access
- Solving problems across VM lifecycle, persistent storage, networking, and image distribution
- Making VM deployments reproducible, secure, and supportable in air-gapped environments
- Working with Product, UX, and Mission Heroes to turn operational needs into useful product capabilities
Responsibilities:
- Own the design, implementation, testing, and delivery of complex software features and systems
- Drive pragmatic technical decisions and contribute to architecture across product components
- Proactively identify and resolve ambiguity in collaboration with Product, UX, and Mission Heroes
- Debug complex issues across Kubernetes, virtualization, storage, networking, and operating systems
- Improve the reliability, security, performance, observability, and maintainability of our software
- Review code, mentor teammates, and help establish strong engineering practices
- Document technical decisions, communicate clearly, and collaborate effectively across teams
Travel Expectations/Requirements: 5-10%
The listed responsibilities are not exhaustive and additional responsibilities may be assigned based on the evolving needs of the organization. We are seeking a dynamic individual who is able to adapt and take on new responsibilities as they arise.
Preferred Experience and Qualifications:
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Strong proficiency in Go or another modern programming language, with an interest in developing Go-based systems
- Experience designing and building software that interacts with Kubernetes or other distributed systems
- Strong understanding of APIs, system design, and software architecture
- Experience developing backend services, controllers, operators, or developer tooling
- Familiarity with Linux systems, containers, and operating system concepts
- Experience building, testing, and operating production software
- Ability to navigate ambiguity, evaluate technical tradeoffs, and independently drive complex work to completion
- Strong problem-solving skills and ability to debug across multiple system boundaries
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, including the ability to influence technical direction and mentor other engineers
Great to Have:
- Experience with KubeVirt, QEMU/KVM, or other virtualization technologies
- Experience developing Kubernetes operators, controllers, or custom resource definitions (CRDs)
- Experience configuring, managing, or troubleshooting Windows virtual machines
- Familiarity with VM image formats, conversion, migration, and lifecycle management
- Experience with Kubernetes networking and storage
- Experience building CLI tools, particularly in Go
- Familiarity with Zarf, OCI artifacts, or software packaging and distribution
- Experience working in air-gapped, disconnected, or regulated environments
- Contributions to Kubernetes, KubeVirt, or other CNCF open-source projects
- Experience building security-focused software or integrating systems with identity, access control, and observability platforms
Full compensation packages are based on candidate experience. Compensation ranges are established using national benchmarking data and apply across all geographic locations within the United States.
Who We Are
Defense Unicorns delivers mission value by streamlining software delivery so our customers can focus on the most important challenges. We share a vision of freedom and security for the advancement of progress and innovation. Our commitment to this vision, and to our mission-driven customers, means a commitment to speed, user experience and optionality, without compromising security. Our team is composed of innovators, software engineers, and veterans with decades of experience delivering technology programs across the federal market.
What We Do
We create and deliver secure solutions for continuous software integration and delivery. Defense Unicorns consolidates the best practices for security pipelines, testing, and deployment automation in order to meet the high security requirements valued by mission owners. Our solutions are agnostic by design and we believe that growing a robust ecosystem of secure, cloud-native software solutions can help enterprise customers inside and outside the federal market buy and integrate software more easily.
Who We Serve
Defense Unicorns’ customers are mission-focused leaders across public and private enterprises. We proudly support defense and civil agencies across the U.S. government and we work closely with the creators of leading-edge software solutions to deliver value to the mission-owner by improving the security and consumability of commercial software products.
What We Work On
- Kubernetes
- Cloud Environments (AWS/GCP and Azure)
- Infrastructure-as-code (like Terraform/Pulumi)
- Continuous Delivery and automation tooling
- GitOps
- Containers
- CNCF projects and open source products and packages
- Helm/Kustomize-Value Stream Mapping
- Building and improving security delivery
- Building Kubernetes and cloud native applications
Benefits Our Unicorns Enjoy
Health:
- Medical/Dental/Vision
- Premiums are 100% Company Paid
- Health Savings Account
- Life Insurance
- Disability Insurance
Financial:
- 401k Retirement Plan
- Company Stock Options
- Home Office Budget
Leave:
- We offer all full-time Unicorns Flexible Time Off (FTO) plus all Federal Holidays, one week for Thanksgiving, and two weeks for Christmas and New Year’s
- Paid Parental Leave
Learning:
- Reimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions
- Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees)
Don’t have all the preferred experience or qualifications? Studies show that underrepresented groups like women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs if they don't meet every requirement listed.
At Defense Unicorns, we're committed to diversity. If you're enthusiastic about the role but don't match every criteria, we encourage you to apply. You could be the perfect fit for this or another role! Defense Unicorns is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, veteran status, genetic information, union status and/or beliefs, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.
CCPA DISCLOSURE
Originally posted on Himalayas