Senior Software Engineer (Guarded OS)

Chainguard is the trusted source for open source, delivering hardened and secure builds of open source software. The Senior Software Engineer will play a key role in developing and maintaining the Elastic Build service and related tooling for Chainguard OS, ensuring systems are reliable, performant, and secure.

Responsibilities:

• Operate and develop the Elastic Build service, our Kubernetes + GitHub + Cloud Run pipeline that converts package specifications into real downloadable artifacts, improving reliability, performance, resource usage, and multi-architecture support
• Maintain and improve Melange, our package build tool, with a focus on usability, testing, patch management, and observability. Melange is largely feature-complete; the work here is hardening and instrumentation, not feature addition
• Design and build automation for rebuild and review workflows — keeping a human in the approval chain while removing every step that can be automated. Support shared library transitions using build-time and runtime dependency analysis
• Build monitoring, dashboards, and alerting. Create automated responses to common failure modes so human attention is reserved for novel problems
• Define and deliver a roadmap for build and update services within the OS team
• Document systems thoroughly and reduce single points of knowledge
• Contribute to distro-level package updates and help keep Chainguard OS up-to-date and secure

Requirements:

• 4+ years of software engineering experience with backend or distributed systems
• Strong programming skills in Go. Comfortable writing production services, ideally including a Kubernetes operator or custom controller
• Hands-on experience operating production services at scale, and has responded to real incidents, restored service, and improved systems to prevent recurrence
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Cloud Run, and cloud-native service design
• Familiarity with GCP services (e.g., BigQuery, IAM, Cloud Logging)
• Experience with Terraform and CI/CD pipelines
• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills across distributed systems
• Able to work independently and communicate clearly in a remote-first environment
• Experience contributing to or maintaining build, packaging, or tooling projects
• Observability and monitoring experience (Grafana, Prometheus, Cloud Logging, etc.)
• Experience with Linux build or packaging systems
• Understanding of dependency management and rebuild automation
• Experience with ARM64 build environments
• Familiarity with BigQuery or Looker Studio for data analysis