Golang Contractor - Open Source

This role centers on collaborating with the open source community to design and implement innovative new features at the frontier of DevOps tooling using Golang. The hire will focus specifically on Open Source projects at Gruntwork, primarily OpenTofu but also other tools, to enhance and evolve the ecosystem. You will review and provide feedback on pull requests from both the community and internal team members to ensure high quality contributions. The position involves maintaining and improving the quality of codebases, infrastructure, and documentation for critical open source projects. You will work asynchronously with a distributed team to break down problems and solutions into manageable chunks of work. This role sets up a path to full-time employment with Gruntwork when future positions open up, should that be of interest. You will be responsible for ensuring that changes are safe, reliable, and meet the high standards of thousands of dependent engineers.

Location: Western Hemisphere

Engagement: contract

- Architect and implement new features for OpenTofu and related open source tools using Golang.

- Collaborate with maintainers to define the technical direction of the project through design discussions.

- Review and provide detailed feedback on community pull requests to uphold code quality and consistency.

- Diagnose and resolve complex bugs in the codebase, infrastructure, and tooling to improve stability.

- Write and maintain comprehensive documentation to support community adoption and usage.

- Refactor legacy code to improve performance, readability, and maintainability without breaking existing functionality.

- Integrate and test changes within the existing CI/CD pipelines to ensure compatibility and reliability.

- Mentor new contributors by guiding them through their first contributions to the project.

- Analyze performance metrics and optimize critical paths to support large-scale deployments.

- Participate in community calls and forums to communicate progress and gather requirements from users.

- Ensure all contributions adhere to the project's security best practices and coding standards.

- Drive the delivery of high-quality releases by coordinating with the OpenTofu core development team.

- Implement automated tests and tooling to increase the reliability of the development workflow.

- Explore and prototype new ideas to address emerging needs in the infrastructure as code space.

- 5+ years of experience in software development, with a focus on Golang.

- Proven experience with open source projects, ideally in a leadership role.

- Must have strong communication skills in English, both written and verbal.

- Comfortable engaging with external members of the open source community as well as Gruntwork customers.

- You're interested in working a flexible number of hours that averages ~25-35 hours/week.

- You are available ~48 weeks per year to work those hours.

- You have read our company values https://www.gruntwork.io/about#our-values, and are aligned with them.

- You have extensive experience with building infrastructure using cloud technologies.

- You have deep familiarity with building cloud infrastructure and security best practices.

- You have extensive hands-on experience with OpenTofu and Terraform, having authored many modules.

- You have operated OpenTofu/Terraform in production environments successfully.

- You have a passion for DevOps best practices and modern cloud infrastructure patterns.

- You have experience taking ownership of software and defining features with stakeholders.

- You can continuously improve massive projects depended on by thousands of engineers safely.

- You are proficient at asynchronous collaboration with remote engineering teams.

- You can break down problems into clear, visible, and manageable chunks of work.

- You know how to balance speed and coverage when writing tests.

- You design software with testability as a core principle.

- You understand how and when to use AI-assisted tooling in development.

- You are comfortable using AI tools like Claude, Codex, Cursor, and Copilot to investigate and generate code.

- Note that the OpenTofu project does not currently allow AI usage, but this policy may evolve to permit limited AI usage through GitHub Copilot.

- You must be located in a time zone between Los Angeles and New York, inclusive.

- You can be located anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, though most team members are in the USA and Canada.

This is a contractor position paid based on an hourly rate, with an expectation of averaging 25-35 hours per week up to 35 hours. You have the ability to control when you work, assuming you coordinate this with your colleagues on the OpenTofu development team. Although you would start as a contractor, this role sets up a path to full-time employment with Gruntwork when future positions open up. You will need to have read Gruntwork's company values and be aligned with them. One of the core values is work-life balance, which requires all team members to live in a time zone between Los Angeles and New York, inclusive. The role is fully remote within the Western Hemisphere, but candidates should be prepared for involvement in the OpenTofu community, including possible participation in core team interactions and user discussions. The interview process will involve a phone screen followed by technical assessments coordinated with the OpenTofu core development team. There may be additional rounds focused on cultural fit and deep technical collaboration.