Staff Software Engineer, Sustaining
Job description
Chainguard is the trusted source for open source. By delivering hardened, secure, and production-ready builds of all the open source software engineers and AI agents rely on, Chainguard helps organizations build faster, stay compliant, and eliminate risk.
Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and global industry leaders, including Anduril, Canva, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpenAI, Snap Inc., and Snowflake.
Chainguard is venture-backed by leading investors, including Amplify, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mantis VC, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital.
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. This role sits on our Package and Image Automation team, part of Sustaining Automation — the group that owns the automation underpinning our entire image factory. As we scale the number of ecosystems and images we support, this team builds and maintains the systems that keep packages and images current, tested, and building cleanly with as little manual intervention as possible.
As a Staff Engineer, you'll be a technical leader and driver of vision 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.
This is a high-impact role at the intersection of developer tooling, AI/agents, and supply chain security.
What you'll do
- Drive the technical vision: Help set the roadmap and priorities for the squad, partnering with engineering leadership in ongoing planning cycles rather than a single fixed plan.
- Architect the automation platform: Design the end-to-end system that orchestrates package creation, test generation, and image building. Own technical decisions that need to 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 build 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.
- Mentor and raise the bar: Help less experienced teammates level up, especially where their background is strong in one area (e.g., OS/distro internals or service maintenance) and lighter in another.
- Collaborate across a distributed team: Work closely with teammates across time zones (primarily US/Canada, with close collaboration across EU and India-based colleagues on adjacent squads).
What we're looking for
- 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; some 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, not just implementing them
- 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, or similar)
- Background maintaining a large number of services in production
- 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)
About Us
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.
By submitting your application, you acknowledge that Chainguard will process your personal data in accordance with Chainguard's Global Candidate Privacy Notice.
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