Staff Software Engineer (Developer Platform)

Chainguard is the trusted source for open source, delivering hardened and secure builds of open source software. The Staff Software Engineer will join the Developer Platform team to enhance internal infrastructure, automation, and AI tooling, enabling engineers to ship secure software efficiently.

Responsibilities:

• Take ownership of significant pieces of the Developer Platform, across monorepo CI/CD, the Agentic AI platform (DriftlessAF), shared build infrastructure, or the change-throughput substrate, and contribute to technical direction alongside the rest of the team
• Improve the speed, reliability, and developer experience of the monorepo CI/CD pipeline so engineers spend more time shipping and less time waiting on or debugging builds
• Contribute to the next generation of change throughput — exploring substrates beyond PR-based workflows for agent-driven changes, helping enable trusted agents to commit directly to main with automated validation, and supporting AI-assisted review and auto-merge for low-risk changes
• Help productionize the Agentic AI platform: agent observability (structured traces, costs, debuggability), RAG-as-platform so any team can give its agents shared memory, and the context-engineering patterns (skills, tools, memory) that keep agents reliable from dev through prod
• Work with the team to consolidate fragmented build systems and deliver standardized "paved road" blueprints so new products can onboard to the monorepo and ship to production quickly
• Partner directly with engineers across the company to identify toil, codify patterns, and automate repetitive manual work away — treating internal stakeholder teams as customers of the platform
• Mentor teammates, raise the bar on design and code review, and serve as a technical voice for engineering velocity and operational excellence

Requirements:

• 8+ years building and operating production services and platform infrastructure in modern cloud environments
• Proficiency with Go, or strong readiness to ramp quickly
• Deep technical expertise in CI/CD systems, container-based orchestration, and the tooling required to scale a large monorepo across build, test, and release
• Experience contributing to technical direction across multiple teams — evaluating tradeoffs, helping deprecate legacy systems, and building alignment around a target architecture
• Familiarity with Agentic AI and LLM-based automation in production, and an interest in context engineering (RAG, memory, tool-calling) at platform scale
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with a track record of identifying and automating away repetitive manual work alongside the engineers who feel it most
• Comfort with ambiguity and a focus on data-driven improvements to product delivery — you're self-directed, set a high bar, and thrive in a fast-moving environment where quality and speed go hand in hand
• Experience scaling GitHub Actions, Argo Workflows, Buildkite, or comparable systems at high throughput
• Experience scaling change-throughput beyond traditional PR workflows — coordinating, validating, and landing high volumes of automated changes
• Background in developer experience metrics (DORA, SPACE) and building the instrumentation to measure and improve them
• Experience operating a large Go monorepo and the tooling around it
• Familiarity with the supply chain security space, container ecosystems (OCI, Kubernetes), or open source software communities
• Experience publishing internal-platform OKRs and running stakeholder feedback loops with engineering teams as customers