Senior Software Engineer - Chainguard

Chainguard is the trusted source for open source software security. By delivering hardened, secure, and production-ready builds of open source software and container images, Chainguard helps Fortune 500 enterprises and global industry leaders build faster, stay compliant, and eliminate risk.

The Role

Chainguard delivers minimal, zero-CVE container images 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 image factory. As we scale ecosystems and images, this team builds and maintains systems that keep packages and images current, tested, and building cleanly with minimal manual intervention.

As a Senior Engineer, you'll be a hands-on contributor to a focused squad, designing systems and building AI-powered tooling to increase automation speed and reliability.

What You'll Do

• Build the automation platform: Contribute to system designs 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. Design prompt architectures, evaluation loops, and quality gates.
• Write production Go: Develop CLI tools, microservices, and system integrations alongside your team.
• Build quality tooling: Develop automation and test frameworks that improve customer reliability.
• Shape team direction: Provide technical input into roadmap planning in a small squad setting.
• Collaborate globally: Work across time zones with teammates primarily in US/Canada, alongside colleagues in EU and India.

What We're Looking For

• 5–7 years of software engineering experience designing and building complex systems.
• Strong expertise in Go.
• Experience with AI/LLM integration, prompt engineering, evaluation loops, and guardrails for code generation or developer tooling.
• Systems architecture skills: ability to design loosely coupled, scalable systems.
• Experience building developer tools, CLIs, or automation platforms.
• Deep Linux and build systems knowledge (apk, apt, rpm, Make, Bazel, containerization).
• Container ecosystem expertise: Docker, OCI, registries, Kubernetes.
• Clear written and verbal technical communication skills.
• Based in the US or Canada.

Nice to Have

• Experience contributing to or working on a Linux distribution (e.g., Wolfi, Red Hat, Ubuntu).
• Background maintaining high-scale production services.
• Open-source software contributions.
• Familiarity with software supply chain security (SBOM, provenance, signing).
• Experience with melange, apko, or Wolfi.
• Understanding of compliance frameworks (FedRAMP, FIPS, STIG).

Benefits

• Flexible & Remote-First: Work remotely with team meetups, bi-annual summits, and monthly stipends for coworking, phone, and internet.
• Equity: Stock option grants upon hire and promotion with a 10-year exercise window.
• 100% Covered Health Insurance: 100% paid health, vision, and dental premiums for you and your dependents.
• Unlimited PTO: Flexible time off policy to recharge.
• Paid Parental Leave: 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents.