Senior Software Engineer (Guarded OS)

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.