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Chainguard is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to 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, a 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 take ambiguous problems, turn them into clear technical plans, and deliver solutions that are maintainable for the long term.
Key responsibilities include:
- Build, operate, and improve Elastic Build, the Kubernetes-based pipeline that transforms package specifications into production-ready artifacts, focusing on reliability, performance, resource efficiency, and multi-architecture support.
- Maintain and evolve Melange, the package build tool, with emphasis on stability, testing, patch management, observability, and operational excellence.
- Design and implement automation for package rebuild and review workflows, eliminating manual steps while preserving human review where it adds value.
- Develop monitoring, dashboards, alerting, and automated remediation to detect issues early and reduce operational toil.
- Help define the roadmap for the build and update services powering Chainguard OS.
- Document systems, architecture, and operational practices to ensure knowledge sharing across the team.
- Contribute to distro-level package updates to keep Chainguard OS secure, current, and reliable.
Required qualifications:
- 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally building backend or distributed systems.
- Strong production experience developing services in Go.
- Experience designing and operating production systems at scale, including on-call rotations, incident response, and operational improvements.
- Strong Linux systems knowledge.
- Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native application design.
- Experience building developer platforms, CI/CD infrastructure, internal tooling, or large-scale B2B SaaS platforms.
- Infrastructure as code (Terraform) and modern CI/CD pipeline experience.
- Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills across distributed systems.
- Comfortable working independently in a remote-first environment.
- Uses AI-assisted development tools as a regular part of engineering workflow.
Nice-to-haves include experience with build systems, packaging tools, Linux packaging, Kubernetes operators, observability tools (Grafana, Prometheus), dependency management, software supply chain tooling, ARM64 environments, and BigQuery/Looker Studio.
About Chainguard
AI / Data / Infrastructure; Legal / Compliance / Risk — software supply-chain security and trusted container images.
