Staff Software Engineer, Sustaining
Chainguard4 hours ago
Base Salary
$205k - $231k/yr
Responsibilities
- Set the squad’s technical vision, roadmap, and priorities in partnership with engineering leadership.
- Architect scalable automation for package creation, test generation, validation, and container image building.
- Develop LLM-integrated and agentic tooling for manifest generation, test scaffolding, and validation.
- Write production Go for CLI tools, services, and integrations.
- Build test generators, validation frameworks, and quality gates that improve customer reliability.
- Mentor teammates, raise engineering quality standards, and collaborate across distributed teams and time zones.
Requirements
- 7+ years of software engineering experience designing and building complex systems.
- Strong Go expertise.
- Experience integrating AI and large language models into code generation, automation, or developer tooling; agentic workflow experience is a plus.
- Systems architecture experience designing loosely coupled, scalable systems and making pragmatic trade-offs.
- Experience building developer tools, command-line interfaces, or automation platforms.
- Deep Linux and build systems knowledge, including package managers such as apk, apt, and rpm, and build tools such as Make and Bazel.
- Expertise with Docker, OCI, container registries, and Kubernetes.
- Ability to influence team direction, roadmaps, and priorities.
- Strong technical communication, autonomy, and cross-team collaboration skills.
- Based in the US or Canada.
- Preferred: Linux distribution experience, production service maintenance, open-source contributions, software supply chain security familiarity, melange, apko, Wolfi, or compliance frameworks such as FedRAMP, FIPS, and STIG.
Benefits
- Flexible remote-first culture 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% company-paid 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.
- Full-time role based in the US or Canada.
Tech Stack
Categories
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.