
Senior Software Engineer (Sustaining Automation)
Overview
Chainguard is the trusted source for open source, delivering hardened, secure, and production-ready builds of open source software.
Job Description
Chainguard helps organizations build faster, stay compliant, and eliminate risk. Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and global industry leaders.
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: 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.
Required Skills
- - 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
Benefits
- - Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Work remotely with team meetup opportunities, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone and internet costs.
- - Our Approach to Equity: Receive stock options upon hire and promotion.
- - 100% Covered Health Insurance: We cover 100% of your health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents.
- - ∞ Flexible Time Off: Take the time you need – to do our best work, we need to recharge and reset.
- - 18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave: We offer 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents.
About the company
Chainguard believes engineering teams should move at the speed of innovation with confidence that every line of code is secure. The company protects open source software from what can go wrong, enabling teams to focus on building what matters. Securing the open source supply chain is Chainguard’s mission. Teams are often told they must choose between speed, security, and scalability when building on open source—achieving all three is seen as impossible. Chainguard’s co-founders rejected that trade-off. With decades of experience building foundational projects like Kubernetes, Sigstore, and Distroless, they recognized that these priorities are not in conflict but part of the same system.
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