Chainguard
Staff Software Engineer, Sustaining Automation
Remote role where the employee must remain based in a particular country.
United States only
Employer listed it 9 days ago · Added 5 days ago
First listed 9 days ago and still open.
Salary
$205k to $231k per year
Location
United States only
Timezone
US East
Contract
Full-time
Experience
Lead
Category
Software
Stated by the employer in the job description
Remote flexibility
Work from home
This is a remote role, but the employee must be based in United States. It is work from home rather than work from anywhere.
What the employer says
- Source listing states candidate location: "United States - Remote, Remote - US"
- Job description states: "Based in the US or Canada"
What Nomaders makes of it
- Payroll and tax are likely handled in that country only
The quotes above are the employer's own words; the reading is ours. Always check the original listing and employment terms before working from another country.
About the role
Chainguard is the trusted source for open source. By delivering hardened, secure, and production-ready builds of all the open source software engineers and AI agents rely on, Chainguard helps organizations build faster, stay compliant, and eliminate risk. Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and global industry leaders, including Anduril, Canva, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpenAI, Snap Inc., and Snowflake. Chainguard is venture-backed by leading investors, including Amplify, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mantis VC, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital.
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 Staff Engineer, you'll be a technical leader and driver of vision for this squad. You'll design systems, build AI-powered tooling, help set the roadmap, and raise the bar for engineering quality across the team. You'll partner closely with engineering leadership on planning and direction, not just execution.
This is a high-impact role at the intersection of developer tooling, AI/agents, and supply chain security.
What you'll do
Drive the technical vision: Help set the roadmap and priorities for the squad, partnering with engineering leadership in ongoing planning cycles rather than a single fixed plan.
Architect the automation platform: Design the end-to-end system that orchestrates package creation, test generation, and image building. Own technical decisions that need to 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: This is a hands-on role — you'll build 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.
Mentor and raise the bar: Help less experienced teammates level up, especially where their background is strong in one area (e.g., OS/distro internals or service maintenance) and lighter in another.
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
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; some exposure to agentic workflows is a strong plus
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
Requirements
The employer hasn't listed requirements separately, they're described in the role summary above and on the original listing.
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. 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.
How to apply
- 1Check the flexibility label above, work from home, matches where you plan to live and work.
- 2Tailor your CV to the role at Chainguard, mentioning your remote working experience and working hours (US East).
- 3Apply directly on the employer's careers page using the button below. Nomaders never handles your application.
Found 6d ago. Last checked today. Always confirm the details on the original posting, salary and location can change after publication.
Listing sourced from Company boards.
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