Senior Software Engineer - Base Layers

Bloomberg•New York, NY

9d•$160,000 - $240,000•Hybrid

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

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.