Staff Software Engineer (Malware Detection)
Chainguard7 hours ago
Base Salary
$170k - $231k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own the architecture, scale, reliability, and production operation of the shared malware-scanning platform.
- Build detection-quality measurement pipelines, metrics, dashboards, review workflows, escalation systems, and bulk-correction capabilities.
- Develop scan orchestration, verdict storage, APIs, policy-management services, and customer workflows for investigating, enforcing, and appealing findings.
- Scale scanning across Libraries, Containers, Agent Skills, and future artifact types while balancing throughput, latency, correctness, extensibility, and cost.
- Build deterministic static analysis and AI-assisted artifact analysis systems, partnering with Product Security to productionize threat detections.
- Operate a critical-path production system with alerting, queue-health monitoring, verdict-before-serve guarantees, and incident response.
- Mentor engineers and provide technical leadership across design, code review, Product, Security, Design, and go-to-market partnerships.
Requirements
- Multiple years of experience building and operating production backend or infrastructure systems with a track record of staff-level ownership and technical leadership.
- Strong Go experience or deep backend systems experience with the ability to ramp quickly in Go.
- Experience owning highly technical platforms or backend infrastructure supporting multiple products or internal customers.
- Experience with high-throughput, event-driven pipelines where throughput, latency, and correctness all matter.
- Strong understanding of software supply chain security, malware detection, vulnerability management, or adjacent security domains.
- Demonstrated ability to make engineering design and prioritization decisions in technically complex and ambiguous environments.
- Experience measuring and improving quality metrics such as false-positive rate.
- Production deployment and operations experience, including reliability, observability, and operational tradeoffs.
- Experience mentoring engineers and raising standards for design and code review.
- Excellent cross-functional collaboration and ability to influence Product, Security, Design, and go-to-market partners.
- Preferred experience with malware detection, static analysis, software composition analysis, vulnerability scanning, reusable platform capabilities, cloud infrastructure, enterprise security platforms, AI-assisted security analysis, sandboxing, dynamic analysis, eBPF, gVisor, seccomp, container isolation, Terraform, or package ecosystems such as npm, PyPI, Maven, Go modules, and container registries.
Benefits
- Remote-first work with team meetups, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly coworking, phone, and internet stipend.
- Stock options upon hire and promotion, participation in secondary offerings, and a 10-year exercise period.
- 100% employer-covered health, vision, and dental insurance premiums for employees and dependents.
- Flexible time off.
- Paid parental leave of 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents.
- The role includes a flexible remote work arrangement.
About Chainguard
Chainguard provides secure, hardened container images and production-ready builds of open source software for enterprises and developers, typically sold via subscriptions and support. Its offerings include Chainguard Images and tools for software supply chain security; the company also maintains Wolfi, a container-focused Linux distribution. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Kirkland, WA, Chainguard’s customers include organizations such as OpenAI, Snowflake, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.