Staff Engineer, AI-Powered Sustaining Automation

Openkrill; United States; Remote; USD 205,000 - 231,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first culture

Job summary

Chainguard is seeking a Staff Engineer to lead the Package and Image Automation squad. You will design scalable automation platforms, build AI-powered tooling, and set the roadmap while contributing hands-on Go work.

You’ll partner with engineering leadership to grow a high-impact team, influence pri orities, and deliver secure, production-ready image factories across diverse ecosystems.

Qualifications

• 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; some exposure to agentic workflows is a strong plus.
• 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.
• Demonstrated ability to help shape team direction: comfortable influencing roadmap and priorities, not just implementing them.
• Strong communication skills: ability to write clear technical documents, work autonomously, and collaborate across teams and time zones.
• Based in the US or Canada

Responsibilities

• Drive the technical vision: help set the roadmap and priorities for the squad, partnering with engineering leadership in ongoing planning cycles.
• Architect the automation platform: design the end-to-end system that orchestrates package creation, test generation, and image building.
• Build AI-powered tooling: develop LLM-integrated, agentic pipelines for manifest generation, test scaffolding, and validation.
• Write production Go: build CLI tools, services, and integrations alongside the team.
• Build quality tooling: develop tooling and automation that improves customer reliability, including test generators, validation frameworks, and quality gates.
• Mentor and raise the bar: help less experienced teammates level up across diverse areas.
• Collaborate across a distributed team: work with teammates across time zones, including US/Canada, EU, and India-based colleagues.

Skills

Go

AI/LLM integration

Systems architecture

Developer tools

Docker/Kubernetes

Linux/build systems

Communication

Tools

Make

Bazel

OCI/Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Chainguard is seeking a Staff Engineer to lead the Package and Image Automation squad. You will design scalable automation platforms, build AI-powered tooling, and set the roadmap while contributing hands-on Go work.

You’ll partner with engineering leadership to grow a high-impact team, influence pri orities, and deliver secure, production-ready image factories across diverse ecosystems.