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Salary: USD 157,000 - 184,000 / annual
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 Inc., and Snowflake.
This role sits on the Package and Image Automation team within Sustaining Automation, the group responsible for the automation infrastructure powering Chainguard's entire image factory. As the company scales the number of ecosystems and images supported, this team builds and maintains systems that keep packages and images current, tested, and building cleanly with minimal manual intervention.
As a Senior Engineer, you will be a hands-on contributor to a small, focused squad, designing systems and building AI-powered tooling that improves the reliability and speed of automation infrastructure. You'll have meaningful opportunity to shape the squad's roadmap and technical direction.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design and contribute to the automation platform that orchestrates package creation, test generation, and image building
- Develop LLM-integrated, agentic pipelines for manifest generation, test scaffolding, and validation; help design prompt architectures, evaluation loops, and quality gates
- Write production Go code for CLI tools, services, and integrations
- Build quality tooling and automation that improves customer reliability, including test generators, validation frameworks, and quality gates
- Contribute technical input into roadmap planning and help influence what the team builds next
- Collaborate across a distributed team spanning US, Canada, EU, and India time zones
This is a high-impact role at the intersection of developer tooling, AI/agents, and supply chain security.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5–7 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 and time zones
- Based in the US or Canada
NICE TO HAVES:
- Experience working on or contributing to a Linux distribution (e.g., Wolfi, Red Hat, Ubuntu)
- Background maintaining a large number of services in production
- Open-source project contributions
- Familiarity with software supply chain security (SBOM, provenance, signing)
- Experience with melange, apko, or Wolfi
- Understanding of compliance frameworks (FedRAMP, FIPS, STIG)
About Chainguard
AI / Data / Infrastructure; Legal / Compliance / Risk — software supply-chain security and trusted container images.
