About Sidero Labs
Sidero Labs builds the infrastructure layer for modern compute: Talos Linux, a minimal, immutable, security-hardened Linux OS (11,000+ GitHub stars, OpenSSF-badged) built to run Kubernetes; and Omni, our SaaS (also available self-hosted) for managing fleets of Talos machines at scale. We're a small, remote-first team with an outsized open-source footprint.
Senior / Staff Software Engineer
Full-time · Remote - Santa Barbara, CA or Europe preferred (time zones compatible with either)
Individual contributor track - no direct reports. Evaluated on your ability to independently own the architecture of a system or component, not on managing people. Reports to our VP of Engineering, joining a team of ~10 engineers.
What you'd own
- Design, build, and evolve a specific subsystem within Talos Linux or Omni end-to-end - from technical proposal through production operation.
- Write and drive adoption of architecture/design docs on your own technical authority, not through org-chart authority.
- Do root-cause work on hard, cross-stack problems spanning the Linux kernel, containerd, etcd, the Kubernetes control plane, or virtualization internals (KVM/libvirt).
- Raise the bar through code review, RFC feedback, and pairing - mentorship without formal performance management.
What we're looking for
- 6+ years professional software engineering experience with deep, hands-on Go expertise.
- A track record of independently architecting a non-trivial system or component in production - not just contributing to one someone else designed.
- Deep Linux systems knowledge: kernel internals, syscalls, cgroups/namespaces, or comparable low-level systems work.
- Production experience with Kubernetes and the cloud-native control-plane stack (containerd, etcd) - OR deep experience with virtualization internals (KVM, libvirt) is equally valued.
- Writing Kubernetes controllers/operators, gRPC-based services, or virtualization tooling - strong plus.
- Prior open-source maintainer or significant-contributor experience - strong plus.
- Comfortable being the final technical call on your area without needing managerial authority to make it stick.
Our interview process
Our process usually looks like this:
- Intro interview - short, no technical questions, just to get to know each other, plus a quick cultural fit check (1 person).
- Offline code review - either you share open-source code you're proud of, or you complete a small test exercise; either way, the team reviews your source code, and the result is either "good, let's move on" or "bad, let's stop here" (offline).
- Technical session - we start by asking questions about your code submission, then move into several areas of discussion without any live coding (3-4 people).
Compensation approach
Base salary $130,000-$250,000 USD, based on location and depth of relevant systems experience.
Apply
Apply through the job posting or email your resume and a brief note of interest to hiring@SideroLabs.com.