Staff Software Engineer (Sustaining Automation)
$205k - $230k USD
Who we are
At Chainguard, we are on a mission to secure the software supply chain by default. Our team is founded by the industry's leading experts on open source software, security and cloud native development.
Chainguard's product portfolio includes Chainguard Images and Chainguard Services. Customers range from Fortune 500 companies in banking, fintech, government and infrastructure to startups and SMBs. Join us as we help organizations secure their software supply chain from source to production.
The role, in a nutshell
Chainguard delivers the industry's most secure container images: minimal, zero-CVE, rebuilt daily from source. We're building a new team focused on automation and tooling to accelerate how we deliver images at scale.
As a Staff Engineer, you'll be the technical leader for this greenfield effort. You'll design systems, build AI-powered tooling, and shape the future of our fulfillment platform. You'll work closely with a small team of engineers, guiding technical decisions and raising the bar for engineering quality.
This is a high-impact role at the intersection of developer tooling, AI/agents, and supply chain security.
What you'll do
Architect the automation platform: Design the end-to-end system that orchestrates package creation, test generation, and image building. Own the technical vision and make decisions that will scale.
Build AI-powered tooling: Develop LLM-integrated, agentic pipelines for manifest generation, test scaffolding, and validation. Design prompt architectures, evaluation loops, and quality gates.
Write production Go: This is a hands on role! You'll develop CLI tools, services, and integrations alongside your team.
Build quality tooling: Develop tooling and automation that improves customer reliability, including test generators, validation frameworks, and quality gates.
Lead and mentor: Guide a growing team of engineers. Set technical direction, review designs, and help teammates level up. Drive outcomes that extend beyond your immediate team.
Shape the roadmap: Collaborate with engineering leadership to identify the highest-impact problems and ensure they get solved. Participate in long-term planning for the organization.
What we're looking for
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of designing and building complex systems
- Strong Go expertise
- Experience with AI/LLM integration: building systems that use language models for code generation, automation, or developer tooling. Familiarity with prompt engineering, evaluation, and guardrails
- Systems architecture skills: ability to design loosely-coupled, scalable systems and make pragmatic trade-offs
- Experience building developer tools, CLIs, or automation platforms
- Deep Linux and build systems knowledge: experience with package managers (apk, apt, rpm), build tools (Make, Bazel, language-specific toolchains), and containerization
- Container ecosystem expertise: Docker, OCI, container registries, Kubernetes
- Strong communication skills: ability to write clear technical documents, work autonomously, and collaborate across teams
Nice to haves
- Contributions to open-source projects
- Familiarity with software supply chain security (SBOM, provenance, signing)
- Experience with melange, apko, or Wolfi
- Understanding of compliance frameworks (FedRAMP, FIPS, STIG)
Base Salary Range
$205,000—$230,000 USD
About Us
Chainguard is the secure foundation for software development and deployment. By providing guarded open source software, built from source and updated continuously, Chainguard helps organizations eliminate threats in their software supply chains.
Founded by the industry's leading experts on open source software, security and cloud native development, Chainguard has built the largest library of open source software that is secure by default.
Chainguard’s mission is to be the safe source for open source.
We live and breathe our company values:
We are customer obsessed - We focus on delivering solutions to our customers that create value and make their lives better.
We have a bias for intentional action - We prioritize, plan, try things, and fail fast.
We don’t take ourselves too seriously (but we do serious work) - We are solving an important problem which takes focus, but we also like to enjoy the journey.
We trust each other and assume good intentions - We’re transparent with decisions to empower team members to make well informed decisions.
A few of the benefits we offer:
- Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Work remotely with team meetup opportunities, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone and internet costs.
- Our Approach to Equity: Receive stock options upon hire and promotion. Plus, you can participate in secondary offerings and have 10 years to exercise your options (yes, you read that correctly: 10 years!).
- 100% Covered Health Insurance: We cover 100% of your health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents. Nothing comes out of your paycheck.
- ∞ Flexible Time Off: Take the time you need – to do our best work, we need to recharge and reset.
- 18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave: We offer 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents, with the option to use it all at once or throughout your child's first year.
If your experience is close but doesn’t fulfill all requirements, please apply. We’re building the best team in technology and are focused on hiring “Chainguardians'' with unique backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences.
Chainguard is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, reproductive health decisions, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, political views or activity, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law.
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