Senior Software Engineer, Sustaining Automation

Chainguard is a trusted source for open source software, delivering hardened, secure, and production-ready builds to help organizations secure their software supply chains. The Senior Software Engineer will design automation systems, develop AI-powered tooling and production Go services, improve quality and reliability, and contribute to the squad’s technical roadmap.

Responsibilities:

• Contribute to the design of systems that orchestrate package creation, test generation, and image building
• Develop LLM-integrated, agentic pipelines for manifest generation, test scaffolding, and validation. Help design prompt architectures, evaluation loops, and quality gates
• This is a hands-on role — you'll develop CLI tools, services, and integrations alongside your team
• Develop tooling and automation that improves customer reliability, including test generators, validation frameworks, and quality gates
• Contribute ideas and technical input into planning; on a small squad, your voice will directly influence what the team builds next
• Work closely with teammates across time zones (primarily US/Canada, with close collaboration across EU and India-based colleagues on adjacent squads)

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 and time zones
• Based in the US or Canada
• Experience working on or contributing to a Linux distribution (e.g., Wolfi, Red Hat, Ubuntu, or similar)
• Background maintaining a large number of services in production
• 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)