Senior Principal Software Engineer - Virtualization and Modernization Staff Engineer

Job Summary

The Red Hat Engineering team is looking for a Senior Principal Software Engineer to join our global team. In this role you'll be responsible for setting and achieving mid-term strategic objectives aligned to company business goals. As a part of the responsibilities you will work with multiple teams and organizations to design, architect, and lead the implementation of future Modernization and Virtualization solutions.

The role exercises expert judgment and business acumen to work on and resolve highly complex issues that impact critical initiatives and key business processes. This role serves as a technical lead and mentor to other team members, providing expert guidance.

Note: This role may come into contact with confidential or sensitive customer information requiring special treatment in accordance with Red Hat policies and applicable privacy laws.
 

At Red Hat, our commitment to open source innovation extends beyond our products - it’s embedded in how we work and grow. Red Hatters embrace change – especially in our fast-moving technological landscape – and have a strong growth mindset. That's why we encourage our teams to proactively, thoughtfully, and ethically use AI to simplify their workflows, cut complexity, and boost efficiency. This empowers our associates to focus on higher-impact work, creating smart, more innovative solutions that solve our customers' most pressing challenges.

What you will do:

• Design, lead, and help implement virtualization and modernization related solutions for Red Hat's next-generation platforms, based on Red Hat OpenShift and thus Kubernetes

• Identify problems that need to be solved, set and achieve strategic technical objectives to solve those problems

• Lead cross-functional teams to deliver software solutions that align with business objectives

• Proactively leverage AI technologies to streamline workflows, simplify processes, and enhance overall efficiency

• Proactively utilize and experiment with AI-assisted tools and technologies, such as code generation, auto-completion, and intelligent suggestions, to accelerate development cycles, enhance code quality, and support test design, automation, and peer review throughout the development lifecycle

• Provide technical expertise and guidance on complex software and system issues

• Serve as a technical lead for major software initiatives and lead the team to success

• Set and maintain a visible leadership presence in upstream projects, including contributing new development work for projects like Kubernetes, KubeVirt, Konveyor AI and Forklift

• Use your deep virtualization and Kubernetes expertise to help customers solve complex business problems with creative solutions

• Mentor and coach engineering staff to develop their technical and leadership capabilities

• Represent the team in technical discussions with senior leadership and stakeholders

What you will bring: 

• Significant experience with Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, and container networking technologies

• Strong virtualization knowledge including expertise in one or more of scheduling, fencing, storage, network, life-cycle management

• Deep understanding and experience with Generative AI technologies

• Experience with cloud technologies

• Experience using programming languages like Go, Python or C, C++

• Understanding of how open source and free software communities work

• Self-driven and highly motivated with a proactive attitude, willingness to tackle new problems, and an ability to develop new architectures and identify good ones

• Ability to work well as part of a team in a highly collaborative, distributed environment with a diverse team

• Ability to present to customers and stakeholders

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to identify opportunities for AI integration within the software development lifecycle, driving continuous improvement and innovation in engineering practices; share use cases for successful experiments with stakeholders for broader use

The following are considered a plus:

• Experience with Linux virtualization technologies

• Previous contributions to open source projects or being an open source main