Senior Software Engineer (Guarded OS)

The role, in a nutshell:

Chainguard is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to take a significant role on the services and tooling that build and update the software that makes up Chainguard OS. This role sits within the GuardedOS team — the foundation layer on which every Chainguard product depends, and will primarily focus on Elastic Build, our Kubernetes-based package build pipeline.

This is a high-ownership, high-variety engineering role. You will design, implement, operate, and improve the systems that keep Chainguard OS Packages up to date. You'll be the person who turns ambiguity into an action plan and executes without breaking things — fast, with a clear eye on long-term maintainability.

 What you’ll do:

• 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.

What we're looking for:

• 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.

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.