Senior Software Engineer (Sustaining Automation)

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. We're building a new team focused on automation and tooling to accelerate how we deliver images at scale. As a Senior Engineer, you'll be the technical leader for this greenfield effort. You'll design systems, build AI-powered tooling, and shape the future of our fulfillment platform. You'll work closely with a small team of engineers, guiding technical decisions and raising the bar for engineering quality. This is a high-impact role at the intersection of developer tooling, AI/agents, and supply chain security. What you'll do Architect the automation platform: Design the end-to-end system that orchestrates package creation, test generation, and image building. Own the technical vision and make decisions that will 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 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. Shape the roadmap: Collaborate with engineering leadership to identify the highest-impact problems and ensure they get solved. Participate in long-term planning for the organization. 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 Nice to haves 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 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 in