Staff Software Engineer — Remote, AI-Driven Secure Containers

Socket.dev; United States; Remote; USD 205,000 - 231,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first culture

Equity options

Health insurance coverage

Flexible time off

18 weeks parental leave

Job summary

Chainguard is a leading security company focused on securing the software supply chain. This Staff Engineer role sits on the Package and Image Automation team within Sustaining Automation, owning the automation underpinning our image factory.

You will shape the roadmap, design scalable systems, and build AI-powered tooling while collaborating with leadership across time zones. This is a high-impact, hands-on leadership position.

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 rather than a single fixed plan.
• Architect the automation platform: Design the end-to-end system that orchestrates package creation, test generation, and image building. Own technical decisions that need to scale.
• 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: This is a hands-on role — you'll build 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.
• Mentor and raise the bar: Help less experienced teammates level up, especially where their background is strong in one area and lighter in another.
• 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).

Skills

Go

AI/LLM integration

Systems architecture

Developer tools/CLIs

Linux/build systems

Container ecosystem

Roadmap influence

Communication

US/Canada based

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

OCI

Make

Bazel

Wolfi

apko

melange

Job description

Chainguard is a leading security company focused on securing the software supply chain. This Staff Engineer role sits on the Package and Image Automation team within Sustaining Automation, owning the automation underpinning our image factory.

You will shape the roadmap, design scalable systems, and build AI-powered tooling while collaborating with leadership across time zones. This is a high-impact, hands-on leadership position.