Staff Software Engineer (Customer Platform)

Chainguard is a trusted source for open source, delivering hardened, secure, and production-ready builds that help organizations build faster, stay compliant, and eliminate risk. The Staff Software Engineer will own end-to-end development of Customer Platform features, including backend systems, APIs, entitlements, policies, and customer onboarding services. The role also provides technical leadership, mentors engineers, and coordinates integrations across engineering teams while extending AI-powered customer experiences.

Responsibilities:

• Own features end-to-end: from design through implementation, rollout, and iteration, in close partnership with Product Management and the partner Chainguard teams
• Design, build, and evolve the backend systems (Go, REST/gRPC APIs) that power Chainguard's entitlement, policy, and customer onboarding services
• Serve as the primary technical interface between Customer Platform and other Chainguard engineering teams (Containers, Libraries, OS packages) by understanding their requirements and building integration paths
• Extend Chainguard's agentic AI foundation into customer-facing product experiences
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to senior and mid-level engineers; help the team break down ambiguity and build toward clear outcomes
• Contribute to a product-driven roadmap with real deadlines and clear outcomes, helping the team prioritize tradeoffs and ship iteratively rather than waiting for "perfect”

Requirements:

• Production Go experience
• Strong ownership of API design and backend systems at scale; you've shipped and operated them in production
• Experience working across multiple engineering teams to align on technical standards, integration patterns, and shared infrastructure
• Comfort operating in ambiguity you come with a diagnosis, a recommendation, and a path forward, not just a problem statement
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and provide technical guidance without needing a management title to do it
• Familiarity with cloud-native environments (Kubernetes, cloud provider APIs) is a strong plus
• Experience with entitlements, billing systems, or platform infrastructure is a plus but not required
• Prior exposure to building or extending AI-powered product features is a plus