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ChainguardChainguardUnited States

Senior Software Engineer (Guarded OS)

Senior backend engineer to operate and improve Chainguard's Kubernetes-based Elastic Build pipeline and Melange packaging tool for maintaining secure OS packages at scale.

Salary not listed
Remote4+ YOEBackend Engineering

About the role

Responsibilities

  • Operate and develop the Elastic Build service, a Kubernetes + GitHub + Cloud Run pipeline that converts package specifications into downloadable artifacts
  • Improve reliability, performance, resource usage, and multi-architecture support
  • Maintain and improve Melange package build tool, focusing on usability, testing, patch management, and observability
  • Design and build automation for rebuild and review workflows while keeping a human in the approval chain
  • Support shared library transitions using build-time and runtime dependency analysis
  • Build monitoring, dashboards, and alerting; create automated responses to common failure modes
  • 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 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, responding to real incidents, restoring service, and improving systems
  • 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

Nice-to-haves

  • 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

Skills

GoKubernetesCloud RunGCPTerraformCI/CDBigQueryGrafanaPrometheusArm64

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