Staff Software Engineer

The Role, In a Nutshell

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Developer Platform team. This team builds the “Factory” that powers Chainguard Engineering—the internal infrastructure, automation, and AI tooling that lets our engineers ship secure software at scale.

This is a high-impact, high-visibility role on a team whose mission is to eliminate developer toil and shorten the path from a CVE being issued to a hardened artifact landing in our customers' hands. The team owns the internal platform end-to-end—monorepo CI/CD, our Agentic AI platform (DriftlessAF), shared build infrastructure, and the foundation for how changes get validated, reviewed, and landed. AI agents are reshaping how change reaches production, and a key focus this year is scaling that substrate well beyond what traditional PR-based workflows can support, while keeping safety and review quality high. You'll own meaningful slices of these problems, contribute to direction-setting on the team, and partner with engineering leaders across the org to drive DORA-aligned outcomes and deliver a standardized paved road for new and existing products to ship on.

What You'll Do

• Take ownership of significant pieces of the Developer Platform, across monorepo CI/CD, the Agentic AI platform (DriftlessAF), shared build infrastructure, or the change-throughput substrate, and contribute to technical direction alongside the rest of the team.
• Improve the speed, reliability, and developer experience of the monorepo CI/CD pipeline so engineers spend more time shipping and less time waiting on or debugging builds.
• Contribute to the next generation of change throughput — exploring substrates beyond PR-based workflows for agent-driven changes, helping enable trusted agents to commit directly to main with automated validation, and supporting AI-assisted review and auto-merge for low-risk changes.
• Help productionize the Agentic AI platform: agent observability (structured traces, costs, debuggability), RAG-as-platform so any team can give its agents shared memory, and the context-engineering patterns (skills, tools, memory) that keep agents reliable from dev through prod.
• Work with the team to consolidate fragmented build systems and deliver standardized "paved road" blueprints so new products can onboard to the monorepo and ship to production quickly.
• Partner directly with engineers across the company to identify toil, codify patterns, and automate repetitive manual work away — treating internal stakeholder teams as customers of the platform.
• Mentor teammates, raise the bar on design and code review, and serve as a technical voice for engineering velocity and operational excellence.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years building and operating production services and platform infrastructure in modern cloud environments.
• Proficiency with Go, or strong readiness to ramp quickly.
• Deep technical expertise in CI/CD systems, container-based orchestration, and the tooling required to scale a large monorepo across build, test, and release.
• Experience contributing to technical direction across multiple teams — evaluating tradeoffs, helping deprecate legacy systems, and building alignment around a target architecture.
• Familiarity with Agentic AI and LLM-based automation in production, and an interest in context engineering (RAG, memory, tool-calling) at platform scale.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with a track record of identifying and automating away repetitive manual work alongside the engineers who feel it most.
• Comfort with ambiguity and a focus on data-driven improvements to product delivery — you're self-directed, set a high bar, and thrive in a fast-moving environment where quality and speed go hand in hand.

Nice to have

• Experience scaling GitHub Actions, Argo Workflows, Buildkite, or comparable systems at high throughput.
• Experience scaling change-throughput beyond traditional PR workflows — coordinating, validating, and landing high volumes of automated changes.
• Background in developer experience metrics (DORA, SPACE) and building the instrumentation to measure and improve them.
• Experience operating a large Go monorepo and the tooling around it.
• Familiarity with the supply chain security space, container ecosystems (OCI, Kubernetes), or open source software communities.
• Experience publishing internal-platform OKRs and running stakeholder feedback loops with engineering teams as customers.

Base Salary Range

$205,000 - $231,000 USD

About Us

We live and breathe our company values:

• 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.

If your experience is close but doesn't fulfill all requirements, please apply. We're building the best team in technology and are focused on hiring "Chainguardians" with unique backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences.

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.

By submitting your application, you acknowledge that Chainguard will process your personal data in accordance with Chainguard's Global Candidate Privacy Notice.

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