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Chainguard is a venture-backed software supply-chain security company that delivers hardened, secure, production-ready builds of open-source software. The company serves Fortune 500 enterprises and global leaders including OpenAI, Snap, and Snowflake.
As Principal Software Engineer on the Libraries Platform team, you will set technical direction for a strategic, cross-organizational platform that continuously builds, verifies, and serves open-source libraries across multiple ecosystems. You'll own the technical strategy for multi-ecosystem scaling, designing architecture that lets the platform onboard new language ecosystems (.NET, Go, Rust) without re-deriving core services per ecosystem. This includes generalizing package indexing, build orchestration, and metadata services to be ecosystem-agnostic where possible and cleanly extensible where necessary.
Key responsibilities include driving end-to-end remediation automation to close the loop from CVE detection to verified, released fix with minimal manual intervention; pushing the frontier on novel patch generation using agentic/AI-driven systems that synthesize security fixes when no upstream patch exists; and setting platform-wide technical direction spanning the package index, build/packaging pipelines, registry mirrors, and orchestration tooling.
You will make foundational build-vs-buy and sequencing decisions for bringing new ecosystems online, partner at the organizational level with ecosystem teams and other functions to align the platform roadmap, and raise the technical bar across the organization through mentoring, design reviews, and documentation. You'll own reliability and scalability at the platform level, defining SLOs for the remediation pipeline and leading incident response for critical failures. When necessary, you'll get hands-on with toolchain, compiler, and dependency-resolution problems specific to new ecosystems.
The role requires 12+ years designing, building, and operating infrastructure for language ecosystems or developer platforms (build systems, package registries, CI/CD), with demonstrated Principal-level scope setting technical direction across multiple teams. You need direct experience standing up or significantly extending platform support for a language ecosystem, ideally including .NET (NuGet), Go (modules), or Rust (Cargo). Strong proficiency in Go is essential, with judgment about when a new ecosystem's idioms should bend the platform and when the platform should hold its ground.
About Chainguard
AI / Data / Infrastructure; Legal / Compliance / Risk — software supply-chain security and trusted container images.
