Senior Software Engineer – Guarded OS

Chainguard

Senior Software Engineer developing tools and services for building and updating Chainguard OS. Operate the Elastic Build service and maintain package build tool Melange in a remote-first environment.

Posted 5/20/2026full-timeRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesSeniorWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

BigQueryCloudDistributed SystemsGoGoogle Cloud PlatformKubernetesTerraform

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

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.

Requirements

What you’ll need

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.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Work remotely with team meetup opportunities, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone and internet costs.
Our Approach to Equity: Receive stock options upon hire and promotion. Plus, you can participate in secondary offerings and have 10 years to exercise your options (yes, you read that correctly: 10 years!).
100% Covered Health Insurance: We cover 100% of your health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents. Nothing comes out of your paycheck.
∞ Flexible Time Off: Take the time you need – to do our best work, we need to recharge and reset.
18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave: We offer 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents, with the option to use it all at once or throughout your child's first year.

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

GoKubernetesCloud RunTerraformCI/CD pipelinesdebuggingproblem-solvingdistributed systemspackage build tooldependency analysis

Soft Skills

communicationindependenceusability focustestingpatch managementobservabilityautomationdocumentationroadmap deliveryincident response