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Salary: USD 205,000 - 231,000 / 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 Staff Engineer 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 to support more ecosystems and images, this team builds and maintains systems that keep packages and images current, tested, and building cleanly with minimal manual intervention.
As a Staff Engineer, you will be a technical leader and strategic driver for this squad. You'll design systems, build AI-powered tooling, help set the roadmap, and raise the bar for engineering quality across the team. You'll partner closely with engineering leadership on planning and direction, not just execution.
Key responsibilities include:
- Driving technical vision and setting roadmap priorities in partnership with engineering leadership
- Architecting the end-to-end automation platform that orchestrates package creation, test generation, and image building
- Building LLM-integrated, agentic pipelines for manifest generation, test scaffolding, and validation; designing prompt architectures, evaluation loops, and quality gates
- Writing production Go code for CLI tools, services, and integrations alongside your team
- Developing tooling and automation that improves customer reliability, including test generators, validation frameworks, and quality gates
- Mentoring less experienced teammates, especially helping them develop skills in areas outside their core expertise
- Collaborating 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:
- 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; exposure to agentic workflows is a strong plus
- 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
- Demonstrated ability to help shape team direction: comfortable influencing roadmap and priorities
- 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 (Wolfi, Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc.)
- Background maintaining a large number of services in production
- Open-source 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.
