Senior Software Engineer (Runtimes)

Location: Remote

Department: General

About the Role

We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our Never-Ending Support (NES) team. This role is specifically focused on developing and proving out new product lines in our runtimes. You will research new potential products to add to our ever expanding product line, produce critical security patches for CVEs in our various runtime products (PHP, Postgres, NGINX, etc.), deliver builds across many operating system distributions, and build the automation systems that make this work scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Research and prove out new NES products: assess an end-of-life project's codebase, build system, and CVE history, then stand up a working, supportable build pipeline for it
• Maintain the existing NES portfolio by analyzing upstream security fixes and backporting CVE patches in C, C++, and other languages to end-of-life versions
• Implement more comprehensive or novel security fixes to end of life technologies 
• Read, write, and review CVE backports, reasoning about what a patch might break across versions, platforms, and configurations
• Build and deliver packages across many Linux distributions (RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu, Alpine, Amazon Linux, and others), and add support for new distributions and releases as they ship
• Resurrect and maintain build environments for legacy code: toolchain archaeology, pinning dependencies that no longer resolve, and keeping old compilers and libraries building
• Build and utilize AI-assisted automation for triage, patch analysis, backport drafting, and regression verification, to scale the product securing process
• Build and maintain test harnesses that validate CVE patch correctness and backwards compatibility
• Provide support to customers' engineering teams on compatibility issues and upgrade paths

Required Qualifications

• Strong understanding of language runtimes and server software internals, such as Node.js, PHP, NGINX, or PostgreSQL
• Demonstrated ability to read and reason about unfamiliar low-level C and C++ code: understanding a security patch well enough to reimplement it against a different code baseline. You enjoy working with completely unfamiliar, but significant open source runtimes.
• Experience reviewing security patches for correctness, memory safety, and unintended side effects
• Deep knowledge of Linux packaging and build tooling: autotools, CMake, Make, GCC/Clang, RPM and DEB packaging, and distribution build systems (mock, pbuilder, abuild, or similar)
• Experience building and shipping software across many Linux distributions and versions, and understanding the toolchain, libc, and dependency differences between them well enough to support new distributions as they are released
• Experience with cross-compilation and multiple CPU architectures (x86_64, aarch64, armv7)
• Experience building and debugging complex software from source, including toolchain and build-system archaeology
• Practical experience using LLMs to automate real engineering work, with judgment about where automation helps and where it can't be trusted
• Strong ownership of correctness and quality: rigorous testing, regression coverage, and an instinct for what a patch might break
• Comfortable in a small, high-autonomy team where you help shape the process as much as follow it.
• Ability to take a new product from research to launch
• Comfortable being on support calls with end users of our products, to troubleshoot complex issues that customers have integrating NES into the foundations of their tech stack
• Strong communication skills, to communicate results in early product iterations, or solutions in tier-3 support capacities

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in security research, vulnerability triage, or product security
• Contributions to open source C/C++ projects. High values targets would be PHP, NGINX, PostgreSQL, Node.js, OpenSSL, or the Linux kernel
• Strong grasp of security fundamentals: CVEs, CVSS, common vulnerability classes in C (buffer overflows, use-after-free, integer overflows, format strings, DoS via resource exhaustion), and how to assess exploitability
• Familiarity with container image hardening, SBOMs, artifact signing, and supply chain security
• Experience as either a technical lead or team lead
• Experience running production services on AWS, Azure, and Kubernetes

At HeroDevs, we believe in the power of diversity, equity, and inclusion to drive innovation, creativity, and success. We are committed to creating a workplace that embraces and celebrates individual differences. We encourage people of all backgrounds and experiences to apply.