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Role Description

Chainguard delivers the industry's most secure container images: minimal, zero-CVE, rebuilt daily from source. We're building a new team focused on automation and tooling to accelerate how we deliver images at scale.

As a Staff Engineer, you'll be the technical leader for this greenfield effort. You'll design systems, build AI-powered tooling, and shape the future of our fulfillment platform. You'll work closely with a small team of engineers, guiding technical decisions and raising the bar for engineering quality. This is a high-impact role at the intersection of developer tooling, AI/agents, and supply chain security.

What you'll do

• Architect the automation platform:
  • Design the end-to-end system that orchestrates package creation, test generation, and image building.
  • Own the technical vision and make decisions that will 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 develop 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.
• Lead and mentor:
  • Guide a growing team of engineers.
  • Set technical direction, review designs, and help teammates level up.
  • Drive outcomes that extend beyond your immediate team.
• Shape the roadmap:
  • Collaborate with engineering leadership to identify the highest-impact problems and ensure they get solved.
  • Participate in long-term planning for the organization.

Qualifications

• 8+ 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.
• Familiarity with prompt engineering, evaluation, and guardrails.
• 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.
• Strong communication skills: ability to write clear technical documents, work autonomously, and collaborate across teams.

Nice to haves

• 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).

Benefits

• 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.
• 100% Covered Health Insurance: We cover 100% of your health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents.
• ∞ 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.