Senior Software Engineer, Sustaining Automation

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 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