Nike's Cloud Networking team, part of Cloud & Core Engineering's Runtime Plane, owns the platform that provisions foundational cloud networking across AWS and Azure. The India team partners with engineering leaders in Beaverton to deliver enterprise-scale network provisioning. The greater team sets architecture standards, mentors engineers, and partners across the Runtime Plane to keep domain control planes consistent and reliable.
WHO WE ARE LOOKING FORNike is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to anchor the technical direction of the India team of its Cloud Networking Control Plane - a declarative, Kubernetes-native platform that provisions and reconciles cloud networking across hundreds of AWS accounts and a growing Azure footprint. The ideal candidate owns architecture for Crossplane compositions and surrounding Kubernetes controllers, drives migration from Nike's Terraform/Jenkins provisioning path to a fully declarative model, and mentors engineers hired alongside this role. They write Go daily, make design decisions at Nike's core provisioning scale, and serve as the senior technical voice on the ground in India. The role requires 10+ years of professional software engineering experience building distributed systems, platform infrastructure, or backend services at meaningful scale. Deep Kubernetes experience is required - writing controllers, defining CRDs, and shipping operator-style software in production, with understanding of reconciliation loops, admission webhooks, finalizers, and level-triggered versus edge-triggered design. Direct Crossplane or comparable control-plane experience, deep AWS networking knowledge, working Azure networking knowledge, API design experience, and a track record of technical leadership are essential.
The candidate needs to have deep Kubernetes and Go expertise, proven technical leadership, and the ability to mentor engineers, run design reviews, and drive multi-quarter initiatives to completion. They must be comfortable making architectural trade-offs visible to technical and non-technical stakeholders, serving as an on-call escalation anchor, and partnering across time zones.
8+ years of professional software engineering experience building distributed systems, platform infrastructure, or backend services at meaningful scale.
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, a related engineering discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
Deep Kubernetes, Go, Crossplane, and AWS/Azure networking experience; open-source contributions in the Kubernetes ecosystem preferred.
You'll own technical direction for Nike's Cloud Networking Control Plane in India, designing Crossplane compositions and Kubernetes controllers, driving platform migration, and mentoring engineers while making networking decisions across AWS and Azure at enterprise scale.
You'll own the design and evolution of Crossplane compositions and Composite Resource Definitions (XRDs) - schema, versioning, upgrade paths, and boundaries with complementary Kubernetes controllers.
You'll design and implement Kubernetes controllers, CRDs, and Crossplane providers where out-of-the-box capabilities aren't sufficient - reconciliation loops, admission webhooks, finalizers, idempotency, and drift management.
You'll drive migration from Nike's Terraform/Jenkins provisioning path to the Kubernetes-native path, defining sequencing, invariants, and the target state.
You'll make architectural decisions across AWS and Azure networking - Transit Gateway, CloudWAN, VPC endpoints, PrivateLink, cross-region reachability, and hub-spoke topologies.
You'll set technical standards for the India team across code review, testing, release safety, deprecation windows, and documentation quality.
You'll mentor Software Engineers and other India-based engineers, serve as the on-call escalation anchor, and partner with Engineering Management, Product, and the Principal Engineer on roadmap direction.
You'll represent the Cloud Networking Control Plane in cross-team architecture forums across the Runtime Plane.
