Senior Software Engineer (Guarded OS)

The role, in a nutshell

Chainguard is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to help build and operate the systems that keep Chainguard OS continuously up to date.

You'll join the GuardedOS team—the foundation that every other Chainguard product depends on—and work primarily on Elastic Build, our Kubernetes-based package build platform. This team is responsible for the services that build, update, validate, and deliver the packages that power Chainguard OS.

This is a high-ownership role with broad impact. You'll design, build, and operate production systems while improving their reliability, scalability, and automation. You'll be comfortable taking ambiguous problems, turning them into clear technical plans, and delivering solutions that are maintainable for the long term—not just optimized for the next release.

What you'll do

• Build, operate, and improve Elastic Build, our Kubernetes-based pipeline that transforms package specifications into production-ready artifacts. You'll focus on reliability, performance, resource efficiency, and multi-architecture support.
• Maintain and evolve Melange, our package build tool, with an emphasis on stability, testing, patch management, observability, and operational excellence.
• Design and implement automation for package rebuild and review workflows, eliminating manual steps where appropriate while preserving human review where it adds meaningful value. You'll also support shared library transitions through build-time and runtime dependency analysis.
• Develop monitoring, dashboards, alerting, and automated remediation that help detect issues early and reduce operational toil.
• Help define the roadmap for the build and update services that power Chainguard OS.
• Document systems, architecture, and operational practices to ensure knowledge is shared across the team.
• Contribute to distro-level package updates to help keep Chainguard OS secure, current, and reliable.

What we're looking for

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally building backend or distributed systems.
• Strong experience developing production services in Go.
• Experience designing and operating production systems at scale, including participating in on-call rotations, responding to incidents, and improving systems based on operational learnings.
• Strong Linux systems knowledge.
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native application design. Experience with Cloud Run is a plus, but equivalent experience on AWS or Azure is equally relevant.
• Experience building developer platforms, CI/CD infrastructure, internal tooling, or related systems. Candidates from organizations building systems such as CircleCI, Jenkins, or similar are especially well aligned.
• Alternatively, experience building and operating large-scale, multi-tenant B2B SaaS platforms, with a strong understanding of scalability, reliability, and cost tradeoffs.
• Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform) and modern CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills across distribu