Staff Backend Engineer, Malware Detection Platform

Chainguard; United States; Remote; USD 170,000 - 231,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first culture

Stock options on hire and promotion

Health insurance

Flexible time off

18 weeks paid parental leave

Coworking stipend

Job summary

Chainguard is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to lead the engineering of the production-grade security platform that powers Chainguard Libraries, Containers, and Agent Skills. You’ll own architecture, scale, and reliability, partnering with Product Security to translate threat research into fast, accurate detections.

This backend- and production-infrastructure role emphasizes high-throughput pipelines, observability, and strong Go expertise.

Qualifications

• Multiple years building and operating production backend or infrastructure systems.
• Strong Go experience, or deep backend systems experience with the ability to ramp quickly in Go.
• Experience owning highly technical platforms or backend infrastructure that supports multiple products or internal customers.
• Experience with high-throughput, event-driven pipelines where throughput, latency, and correctness all matter at once.
• Strong understanding of software supply chain security, malware detection, vulnerability management, or adjacent security domains.
• Demonstrated success making engineering design and prioritization decisions in technically complex and ambiguous environments.
• Comfort owning a metric like false-positive rate, instrumenting it honestly, and driving it down in a domain where a missed detection and a false alarm both carry real customer cost.
• Experience deploying and operating services in production, with strong judgment around reliability, observability, and operational tradeoffs, and genuine comfort being on the hook when they misbehave.
• Experience mentoring engineers and raising the bar on design and code review.
• Excellent cross-functional collaboration skills with the ability to influence Product, Security, Design, and GTM partners.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of Chainguard's shared malware scanning platform: scan orchestration, verdict storage, and the APIs every consuming product depends on.
• Scale the scanner beyond Libraries to Containers, Agent Skills, and future artifact types.
• Make the tradeoffs between detection quality, performance, and extensibility concrete in throughput, latency, and cost.
• Build the APIs and services behind how customers investigate, enforce, and appeal scanner findings.
• Build the backend for policy management and enterprise-scale operations.
• Operate the scanner as a system in the critical path of every customer install: alerting, queue health, verdict-before-serve guarantees, and incident response.
• Partner with Product Security to take emerging-threat detections from research prototype to production, running on every new release across every ecosystem we cover.

Skills

Go experience

Backend systems

Production ownership

Observability

Security domain knowledge

Mentoring engineers

Cross-functional collaboration

AI resume phrase awareness

Tools

eBPF

gVisor

seccomp

Job description

Chainguard is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to lead the engineering of the production-grade security platform that powers Chainguard Libraries, Containers, and Agent Skills. You’ll own architecture, scale, and reliability, partnering with Product Security to translate threat research into fast, accurate detections.

This backend- and production-infrastructure role emphasizes high-throughput pipelines, observability, and strong Go expertise.