Senior Software Engineer (Sustaining Automation)

Senior Software Engineer (Sustaining Automation)

Company: Chainguard Location: Remote (Canada, Europe, USA) Contract: Permanent Seniority: Senior

Chainguard is the trusted source for open source, delivering hardened, secure, and production-ready builds of open source software. We empower organizations to build faster, stay compliant, and eliminate risk. Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and global industry leaders.

At Chainguard, we are on a mission to secure the software supply chain by default. Our team is founded by industry experts in open source software, security, and cloud-native development.

About the Role

Chainguard delivers the industry's most secure container images: minimal, zero-CVE, and rebuilt daily from source. We are building a new team focused on automation and tooling to accelerate image delivery at scale.

As a Senior Engineer, you will be the technical leader for this greenfield initiative. You will design systems, build AI-powered tooling, and shape the future of our fulfillment platform. This is a high-impact role at the intersection of developer tooling, AI/agents, and supply chain security.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect the automation platform: Design the end-to-end system for orchestrating 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 hands-on.
• Build quality tooling: Develop tooling and automation to improve customer reliability, including test generators, validation frameworks, and quality gates.
• Shape the roadmap: Collaborate with engineering leadership to identify and solve the highest-impact problems. Participate in long-term organizational planning.

Requirements

• 5-7 years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record of designing and building complex systems.
• Strong expertise in Go.
• Experience with AI/LLM integration: building systems that leverage 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 knowledge of Linux and build systems: experience with package managers (apk, apt, rpm), build tools (Make, Bazel, language-specific toolchains), and containerization.
• Expertise in the container ecosystem: Docker, OCI, container registries, Kubernetes.
• Strong communication skills: ability to write clear technical documents, work autonomously, and collaborate across teams.

Nice to Haves

• 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).

What We Offer

• Base Salary Range: $157,000—$184,000 USD
• Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Work remotely with opportunities for team meetups, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone, and internet costs.
• Equity: Receive stock options upon hire and promotion, with the ability to participate in secondary offerings and 10 years to exercise options.
• 100% Covered Health Insurance: Chainguard covers 100% of your health, vision, and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents.
• Flexible Time Off: Take the time you need to recharge and reset.
• Paid Parental Leave: 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents.

We are customer-obsessed, have a bias for intentional action, and foster a culture of trust and transparency. If your experience is close but doesn't fulfill all requirements, please apply. We are building the best team in technology and value unique backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences.

Chainguard is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law.