Senior Software Engineer, Guarded OS — Remote Build

Chainguard; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Health insurance

Remote-first culture

Unlimited PTO

Parental leave

Job summary

Chainguard is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to help build and operate the systems that keep Chainguard OS continuously up to date. You will join the GuardedOS team, focusing on Elastic Build and the Kubernetes-based package build platform that powers Chainguard OS.

This high-ownership role involves designing, building, and operating production systems with an eye toward reliability, scalability, and automation.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend or distributed systems.
• Strong experience developing production services in Go.
• Experience operating production systems at scale including on-call and incident response.
• Strong Linux systems knowledge.
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native design. AWS/Azure or GCP experience is a plus.
• Experience building developer platforms, CI/CD infrastructure, or related systems.
• Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform) and modern CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills across distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Build, operate, and improve Elastic Build, a Kubernetes-based pipeline transforming package specs into production-ready artifacts.
• Maintain and evolve Melange, our package build tool, focusing on stability and observability.
• Design automation for package rebuild and review workflows with human review where valuable.
• Develop monitoring, dashboards, alerting, and automated remediation to reduce operational toil.
• Help define the roadmap for build/update services powering Chainguard OS.
• Document systems, architecture, and operational practices for team-wide knowledge sharing.
• Contribute to distro-level package updates to keep Chainguard OS secure and current.

Skills

Go backend

Distributed systems

Linux

Kubernetes

Cloud Run / AWS / Azure

CI/CD tooling

Terraform

Debugging distributed systems

Tools

Grafana

Prometheus

BigQuery

Job description

Chainguard is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to help build and operate the systems that keep Chainguard OS continuously up to date. You will join the GuardedOS team, focusing on Elastic Build and the Kubernetes-based package build platform that powers Chainguard OS.

This high-ownership role involves designing, building, and operating production systems with an eye toward reliability, scalability, and automation.