[Hiring] OpenBao Developer @ControlPlane

Role Description

We are seeking an Intermediate or Senior Go Engineer to join our open-source development team, working directly alongside our Head of OpenBao Development. In this role, you will focus on core backend development, designing, building, and maintaining new features for OpenBao, the open-source identity-aware secrets management platform.

• Write clean, secure, high-performance Go code.
• Contribute to core architectural design discussions.
• Build custom secrets engines and auth methods.
• Help lead open-source community contributions on ControlPlane’s behalf.

What You'll Do

• OpenBao Core Development
  • Feature Engineering: Design, write, and maintain core capabilities, plugins, storage backends, and secrets engines for OpenBao in Go.
  • Collaboration: Partner directly with the Head of OpenBao Development to refine system architecture, author technical RFCs, and break down complex feature roadmaps into clear engineering deliverables.
  • Secure Coding: Ensure all code adheres to strict cryptography best practices, memory management safety, and secure-by-design principles. Review and remediate any vulnerability reports.
• Open Source & Upstream Maintenance
  • Community Engagement: Participate in upstream open-source development, reviewing pull requests, triaging issue reports, and maintaining high standards for community contributions.
  • Internal R&D: Work on internal lab projects, security tooling, and integration prototypes that advance open-source identity and secrets management.
• Quality & Testing
  • Testing & Automation: Write comprehensive unit, integration, and security tests for Go codebase changes to maintain reliability across production releases.
  • Pipeline Hardening: Collaborate on CI/CD automation, release workflows, and supply chain security for OpenBao distribution artifacts.

Qualifications

• Strong Go (Golang) Engineering: Solid experience writing production-grade Go code, with a strong understanding of concurrency (goroutines/channels), interface design, testing suites, and performance profiling.
• Systems & Security Engineering: Solid understanding of software security fundamentals, such as PKI/TLS, cryptography concepts, authentication/authorization models, and API design.
• Experience Level: Intermediate to Senior software engineering background (typically 3–5+ years in backend systems development).

Requirements

• OpenBao or Vault Experience: Direct experience with the OpenBao or HashiCorp Vault codebase (plugin architecture, storage drivers, dynamic secrets, or internal RPC mechanisms) is highly desirable, though not strictly required.
• Cloud-Native Infrastructure: Familiarity with Linux primitives, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and Infrastructure-as-Code tooling (Terraform/OpenTofu).
• Open Source Work: Previous track record of contributing to open-source Go projects or security tooling.

Benefits

• Generous and competitive salary + Bonus
• 33 days of paid holiday, including paid leave for the standard 8 UK Bank Holidays
• Enhanced Parental Leave
• Private Medical and Dental Insurance
• An individual training budget for personal development, including but not limited to:
  • Conferences
  • Training (books, courses, coaching, as well as internal training which is of course included beyond budget)