Senior Software Engineer, Sustaining Automation

Who we are

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

Chainguard's product portfolio includes Chainguard Images and Chainguard Services. Customers range from Fortune 500 companies in banking, fintech, government, and infrastructure to startups and SMBs. Join us as we help organizations secure their software supply chain from source to production.

The role, in a nutshell

Chainguard delivers the industry's most secure container images: minimal, zero-CVE, rebuilt daily from source. This role sits on our Package and Image Automation team, part of Sustaining Automation — the group that owns the automation underpinning our entire image factory. As we scale the number of ecosystems and images we support, this team builds and maintains the systems that keep packages and images current, tested, and building cleanly with as little manual intervention as possible.

As a Senior Engineer, you'll be a hands-on contributor to a small, focused squad, designing systems and building AI-powered tooling that raise the reliability and speed of our automation. You'll have real opportunity to help shape the direction of the squad's roadmap, especially given its small size.

This is a high-impact role at the intersection of developer tooling, AI/agents, and supply chain security.

What you'll do

• Build the automation platform: Contribute to the design of systems that orchestrate package creation, test generation, and image building.
• Build AI-powered tooling: Develop LLM-integrated, agentic pipelines for manifest generation, test scaffolding, and validation. Help design prompt architectures, evaluation loops, and quality gates.
• Write production Go: This is a hands-on role — you'll 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.
• Help shape the roadmap: Contribute ideas and technical input into planning; on a small squad, your voice will directly influence what the team builds next.
• Collaborate across a distributed team: Work closely with teammates across time zones (primarily US/Canada, with close collaboration across EU and India-based colleagues on adjacent squads).

What we're looking for

• 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

Nice to haves

• 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)

Base Salary Range

$157,000—$184,000 USD

About Us

A few of the benefits we offer:

• 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. Plus, you can participate in secondary offerings and have 10 years to exercise your options (yes, you read that correctly: 10 years!).
• 100% Covered Health Insurance: We cover 100% of your health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents. Nothing comes out of your paycheck.
• ∞ 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, with the option to use it all at once or throughout your child's first year.