OpenBao Developer

Reports To: Delivery Manager, Head of OpenBao Development
Employment Status: Full Time
Salary: Up to £100k + bonus + benefits. 

Who is ControlPlane?

ControlPlane is a London-headquartered consultancy specialising in cloud-native, Kubernetes, and open-source security solutions. Our expertise lies in helping organisations adopt and secure complex cloud infrastructures by implementing security measures that are "secure-by-design" and "secure-by-default." This engineering excellence drives ControlPlane deep into cybersecurity, providing services like zero-trust architectures, threat modeling, supply chain security, and platform engineering.

We are acclaimed for our work in highly regulated industries, such as finance, healthcare, and national infrastructure. We help clients consume next-generation and open-source projects safely and securely. In addition to consulting, we are active contributors to the open-source community supporting projects like Flux CD, OpenBao, and FINOS AI Readiness.

What We're Looking For

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.

You will spend your time writing clean, secure, high-performance Go code, contributing to core architectural design discussions, building custom secrets engines and auth methods, and helping lead open-source community contributions on ControlPlane’s behalf. Prior experience working within the OpenBao codebase is a strong bonus, but strong Go systems engineering skills and an aptitude to learn are what matter most.

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.

What We're Looking For

Core Technical Capabilities

• 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).

Desirable / Bonus Experience

• 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.

Location & Eligibility

• This is a global role, but candidates in our existing regions within Europe, North America, and APAC would be given priority
• Ability to align work hours with a global team across USA, NZ, UK.

Benefits

ControlPlane is a dynamic, cutting-edge and passionate business to work for. Our employees are at the heart of our business, which means we care about our culture, our people and their progression.

Alongside this, as a colleague you will have the following 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)

Qualifications

We believe our peers are equally as important as the technology we use. We're looking for people of the highest personal calibre: quietly confident, with a strong work ethic, keenness to learn, emotional maturity and respect, who understand that "we" is more than "me" and who embrace human diversity of all kinds.

As we grow, you'll help us build a company culture of which we can all be proud. If you share these values, we want to hear from you!

NOTE FOR RECRUITMENT AGENCIES: Please do not call or email our team speculatively. We do not accept unsolicited CVs.