Senior Software Engineer (Sustaining Automation)

Chainguard is a trusted source for open source, delivering secure and production-ready builds of open source software. They are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead a new team focused on automation and tooling to enhance their fulfillment platform, designing systems and developing AI-powered tooling.

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
• 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:

• 5-7 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)