Senior Software Engineer, Sustaining Automation

Chainguard; Raleigh (NC); Remote; USD 157,000 - 184,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible & Remote-First Culture

Equity stock options

100% Covered Health Insurance

Flexible Time Off

18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave

Job summary

Chainguard, the trusted source for secure open source software, is seeking a Senior Engineer to join our Package and Image Automation team. You will design systems, build AI-powered tooling, and contribute to the roadmap, helping scale the image factory with minimal manual intervention.

You will work on production-grade Go code, collaborating with colleagues across US/Canada, and across EU/India. This remote-first role emphasizes reliability, security, and developer tooling at scale.

Qualifications

• 5–7 years of software engineering experience with complex systems.
• Strong Go expertise.
• Experience with AI/LLM integration and prompts.
• Experience building developer tools, CLIs, or automation platforms.
• Deep Linux/build systems knowledge with package managers and compilers.

Responsibilities

• Build the automation platform for package creation, test generation, and image building.
• Develop AI-powered tooling: LLM-integrated pipelines for manifest generation and validation.
• Write production Go: CLI tools, services, and integrations.
• Create quality tooling: test generators, validation frameworks, and gates.
• Help shape the roadmap: contribute ideas for features in a small squad.
• Collaborate across time zones US/Canada, EU, India.

Skills

Go programming

AI/LLM integration

Systems architecture

Developer tooling

Linux/build systems

Container ecosystem

Cross-team communication

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Make

Bazel

OCI image specs

Job description

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
• Based in the US or Canada

Nice to haves

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

Base Salary Range

$157,000—$184,000 USD

About Us

• We are customer obsessed — We focus on delivering solutions to our customers that create value and make their lives better.
• We have a bias for intentional action — We prioritize, plan, try things, and fail fast.
• We don't take ourselves too seriously (but we do serious work) — We are solving an important problem which takes focus, but we also like to enjoy the journey.
• We trust each other and assume good intentions — We're transparent with decisions to empower team members to make well informed decisions.

A Few Of The Benefits We Offer

• 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.

Chainguard is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, reproductive health decisions, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, political views or activity, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law.

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