Staff Software Engineer (Sustaining)

Join Chainguard, a company dedicated to delivering the most secure container images in the industry. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be a technical leader and driver of vision for the Package and Image Automation team. You will design systems, build AI-powered tooling, set the roadmap, and raise the bar for engineering quality across the team. This is a high-impact role at the intersection of developer tooling, AI/agents, and supply chain security.

Conduire la vision technique de l'équipe, établir la feuille de route et les priorités, et collaborer avec la direction technique.

Architecturer la plateforme d'automatisation, concevoir le système de bout en bout qui orchestre la création de packages, la génération de tests et la construction d'images.

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

Responsibilities

• Développer des outils alimentés par l'IA, concevoir des architectures de prompt, des boucles d'évaluation et des portes de qualité.
• Demonstrated ability to help shape team direction: comfortable influencing roadmap and priorities, not just implementing them

Requirements

• Experience building developer tools, CLIs, or automation platforms

Strong Go expertise

• 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

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

Preferred

• Contributions to open-source projects
• Familiarity with software supply chain security (SBOM, provenance, signing)

Pay

USD 205,000 - 231,000