Chainguard is on a mission to secure the software supply chain by default, providing guarded open source software built from source. The Staff Engineer will lead a new team focused on automation and tooling, designing systems and building AI-powered tools to enhance the fulfillment platform.
Responsibilities:
- 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
Requirements:
- 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
- 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)