SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
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. This is not an operational role—you're architecting how the platform generalizes to new language ecosystems (Go, Rust, .NET) and automating the remediation pipeline from CVE detection through patch, rebuild, verification, and release.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own technical strategy for multi-ecosystem scaling: define architecture that lets the platform onboard new language ecosystems without re-deriving core services, generalizing package indexing, build orchestration, and metadata services.
- Drive end-to-end remediation automation: redesign CVE workflows to close the loop from detection to verified, released fix with minimal manual intervention, including rebuild triggering, SBOM/provenance regeneration, and policy verification.
- Push the frontier on AI-driven patch generation: set direction for agentic systems that synthesize security fixes when no upstream patch exists, with automated validation, regression testing, and human checkpoints.
- Set platform-wide technical direction spanning package index, build/packaging pipelines, registry mirrors, and orchestration tooling serving external customers and internal teams at scale.
- Make foundational build-vs-buy and sequencing decisions for bringing new ecosystems online, identifying what's genuinely novel about each toolchain and what can reuse existing platform primitives.
- Partner at the org level with Ecosystem teams, Platform, Delivery, and Security to align roadmap with business risk and commitments.
- Mentor Staff and Senior Engineers, drive design reviews for major architectural bets, and write RFCs enabling other teams to build correctly on the platform.
- Own reliability and scalability: define SLOs for the expanded remediation pipeline and lead incident response for platform failures.
- Get hands-on when needed: dig into toolchain, compiler, and dependency-resolution problems specific to new ecosystems (NuGet, Go modules, Cargo).
Required qualifications: 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. Direct experience standing up or significantly extending platform support for a language ecosystem, ideally including .NET, Go, or Rust. Strong Go proficiency with judgment about when ecosystem idioms should bend the platform.
About Chainguard
AI / Data / Infrastructure; Legal / Compliance / Risk — software supply-chain security and trusted container images.
