Chainguard - Staff Software Engineer, Sustaining Automation
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; 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 • 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)
Responsibilities
• 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. • Drive the technical vision: • 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. • Architect the automation platform: • Build AI-powered tooling: Develop LLM-integrated, agentic pipelines for manifest generation, test scaffolding, and validation. Design prompt architectures, evaluation loops, and quality gates. • Build AI-powered tooling: • Write production Go: This is a hands-on role — you'll build CLI tools, services, and integrations alongside your team. • Write production Go: • Build quality tooling: Develop tooling and automation that improves customer reliability, including test generators, validation frameworks, and quality gates. • Build quality tooling: • 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. • Mentor and raise the bar: • 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). • Collaborate across a distributed team:
Benefits
• $205,000—$231,000 USD • 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. • 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. • Flexible & Remote-First Culture: • 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!). • Our Approach to Equity: • 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. • 100% Covered Health Insurance: • ∞ Flexible Time Off: Take the time you need – to do our best work, we need to recharge and reset. • ∞ Flexible Time Off: • 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. • 18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave: • 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.
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