Senior Software Engineer (Athena) - Chainguard

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.

About the Role

Chainguard secures the open source supply chain, the infrastructure underneath the majority of the software running in production today. This team is building Athena, the system that makes that possible at enterprise scale. We process vulnerability reports from enterprise customers, validate and deduplicate findings, and route clean signals to remediation. We are building the clearing house that sits between enterprise customers and our remediation engine.

What You'll Do

• Build and maintain core components of the clearing house in Go on GCP including customer onboarding flows, entitlement logic, and data ingestion pipelines.
• Take on ownership of ambiguous problems and specific features or subsystems, driving them from design through production with appropriate testing and observability.
• Work closely with staff and principal engineers to implement architectural patterns that scale.
• Write backend systems that handle unstructured data inputs from enterprise customers and produce structured, validated outputs.
• Design, implement, and operate reliable agentic workflows that automate complex, multi-step tasks across production systems.
• Participate in on-call rotation and contribute to incident response and postmortems.
• Become a go-to engineer for one or more core subsystems, leading multi-engineer efforts over a multi-month horizon.
• Review code, give direct feedback, and raise the team's engineering bar.
• Contribute infrastructure-as-code and operational tooling using Terraform and GCP-native tooling.

What We're Looking For

• Solid backend engineering foundation with experience shipping and maintaining production systems.
• Strong Go engineering skills; GCP and Terraform experience.
• Ability to navigate unstructured data problems (parsing, validating, deduplicating) with a methodical, analytical approach.
• Experience working in a team that prioritizes operational excellence: monitoring, alerting, graceful degradation.
• Ability to scope and drive features independently with minimal oversight.
• Experience with Agentic AI workflows.
• Security or infrastructure domain knowledge.

Nice to Have

• Experience with customer-facing APIs or workflow systems.
• Experience in the security vulnerability domain, coordinated disclosure process, or CVE publication.

Compensation & Benefits

Base Salary Range: $157,000 — $184,000 USD

• 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.
• Equity: Stock options upon hire and promotion with secondary offerings participation and a 10-year exercise window.
• 100% Covered Health Insurance: 100% coverage for health, vision, and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents.
• Flexible Time Off: Unlimited FTO to recharge and reset.
• 18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave: 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents.