Staff Software Engineer (Sustaining)

• 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
• 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)

Benefits

• Equity/stock options
• Unlimited PTO
• Remote work with flexible coworking and team meetup opportunities
• Home office and internet stipend
• 100% health/dental/vision insurance coverage for you and your family
• Experience building developer tools, CLIs, or automation platforms
• Strong Go expertise
• Demonstrated ability to help shape team direction: comfortable influencing roadmap and priorities, not just implementing them
• Systems architecture skills: ability to design loosely-coupled, scalable systems and make pragmatic trade-offs
• Container ecosystem expertise: Docker, OCI, container registries, Kubernetes
• 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
• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of designing and building complex systems
• Based in the US or Canada
• Strong communication skills: ability to write clear technical documents, work autonomously, and collaborate across teams and time zones
• Deep Linux and build systems knowledge: experience with package managers (apk, apt, rpm), build tools (Make, Bazel, language-specific toolchains), and containerization
• 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
• Experience with melange, apko, or Wolfi
• Contributions to open-source projects
• Familiarity with software supply chain security (SBOM, provenance, signing)
• Understanding of compliance frameworks (FedRAMP, FIPS, STIG)
• 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