# Senior Software Engineer (Guarded OS)

**Company:** [Chainguard](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/chainguard)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Experience:** 4+ years
**Skills:** Go, Kubernetes, Cloud Run, GCP, Terraform, CI/CD, BigQuery, Grafana, Prometheus, Arm64
**Posted:** 2026-05-20

> 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.

## Job Description

## 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

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**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/97cdfa52-5173-4480-9fa7-c5fcb63d5023
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/97cdfa52-5173-4480-9fa7-c5fcb63d5023