Staff Software Engineer (Repositories)

Chainguard is the trusted source for open source, delivering hardened, secure, and production-ready builds of open source software. They are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the architecture and implementation of the Repository team’s core systems, including package registries and APIs, while ensuring high reliability and performance.

Responsibilities:

• Own the technical direction for key parts of Chainguard Repository, including customer-facing registries, APIs, and serving systems that make Chainguard artifacts easy to consume securely and reliably
• Design, build, and operate high-availability backend services in Go that serve libraries today and help lay the foundation for containers, images, and APK repositories over time
• Lead work on scalability, reliability, observability, and load testing for production systems that customers depend on directly
• Drive technical decisions around repository architecture, service boundaries, and the operational patterns needed to run artifact-serving infrastructure at scale
• Partner closely with engineers across Chainguard to create a cohesive repository experience and unlock support for more artifact types over time
• Mentor other engineers, raise the bar on design and code review, and act as a force multiplier in a fast-moving team where staff engineers are expected to own meaningful deliverables and help shape how the team works

Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience building and operating production backend or infrastructure systems, with clear evidence of staff-level ownership and technical leadership
• Strong Go experience, or deep backend systems experience with the ability to ramp quickly in Go
• Experience building or operating customer-facing infrastructure such as package registries, artifact repositories, APIs, developer platforms, or other high-scale serving systems
• Experience deploying and managing services in production, with strong judgment around reliability, observability, performance, and operational tradeoffs
• Comfort working across application and infrastructure layers, including service development, cloud infrastructure, and infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform
• Strong systems instincts and curiosity: you proactively identify problems, chase them down, and improve the platform before issues become bottlenecks for customers or internal teams
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, especially in a remote environment where staff engineers are expected to drive alignment across teams and help turn ambiguity into momentum
• Experience with package registries, artifact serving, repository products, or adjacent systems such as Docker registries, GitLab package services, Artifactory, Nexus, or similar platforms
• Familiarity with software supply chain security concepts such as provenance, SBOMs, and trusted artifact distribution
• Open source experience, especially in tooling, package ecosystems, or infrastructure used by developers at scale
• Experience supporting or expanding multi-artifact repository platforms across libraries, containers, OS packages, or similar artifact types