Senior Software Engineer - Base Layers

The Base Layers team is responsible for designing, building, and operating a composable image build platform to derive secure, tested operating system and container images for Bloomberg's managed fleet. Our platform is the foundation for a variety of large-scale, mission-critical workflows, ensuring all machines and container workloads start from a verified, secure state.

Our stack leverages best-in-class open source technologies for infrastructure automation, CI/CD, and workflow orchestration. We focus on deep systems engineering, large-scale distributed architecture, and software development, with a strong emphasis on Linux and security hardening.

What You’ll Work On

• Image Pipeline Design and Implementation – Architecting and building a composable, highly-reliable image and container base image building pipeline for both on-prem and cloud environments.
• Secure Baselines and Hardening – Defining, implementing, and enforcing secure operating system and container baselines, including CIS-aligned controls, to reduce the attack surface across the fleet.
• Tooling and Automation – Developing custom automation frameworks and developer-facing APIs on top of open source projects to streamline the image creation and testing lifecycle.
• Provenance and Supply-Chain Security – Implementing image lineage, asset tracking, and SBOM generation to provide traceability across the image lifecycle and strengthen supply-chain security.
• Testing and Verification – Integrating automated testing into the pipeline to ensure all derived images are fully tested, verified, and ready for deployment.
• Image Visibility and Consumer Interfaces – Building user-facing tools and web interfaces to allow consumers to inspect base image states, metadata, provenance, and compatibility, enabling informed adoption and derivation decisions.
• Upstream OSS Contributions – Collaborating with the broader open source community to enhance the tooling we rely on.

Why Join Us

• Solve hard problems at scale: performance tuning, orchestration of massive workloads, and automation of global fleets.
• Work in a hybrid environment that blends systems reliability engineering with software development.
• See your work impact thousands of developers across Bloomberg and developers worldwide through open source.
• Bring strong engineering principles and informed tool recommendations, helping evolve the platform for the benefit of the product and its users.
• Be part of a team that values deep technical curiosity, collaborative problem-solving, and bold thinking.

What You’ll Need

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience working with an object-oriented programming language (Python, C/C++, Java, etc.)
• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering or similar field of study or equivalent work experience
• Strong Linux/Unix systems background, including deep understanding of operating system internals, hardening, and configuration.
• Experience designing and operating highly-available, large-scale systems.
• Familiarity with foundational security concepts related to OS baselines and layers.
• Familiarity with containerization technologies (Docker, Podman, Kubernetes, etc.) and their security implications.
• A collaborative, pragmatic approach to problem-solving and building scalable solutions.

We’d love to see

• Experience with image building systems (e.g., Packer, Kairos, or similar tools) and CI/CD platforms (e.g., Jenkins or equivalents).
• Hands-on experience with configuration management, orchestration, or workflow systems (e.g., Chef, Ansible, Salt, Airflow or equivalents) in production environments.
• Experience defining and enforcing secure operating system baselines or container layers.
• Experience with one or more programming languages used for systems or product development (e.g., Go, React, Typescript, Ruby).
• Experience contributing to or maintaining open source projects.
• Strong interest in testing, observability, and reliability engineering practices.