Staff Software Engineer, Developer Platform

📋 Job Overview

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.

🏢 About Chainguard

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

🎯 The Role

This is a high-impact, high-visibility role on a team whose mission is to eliminate developer toil, accelerate teams, and shorten the path from vulnerabilities being discovered 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.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Take ownership of significant pieces of the Developer Platform—across monorepo CI/CD, the Agentic AI platform, shared build infrastructure, and contribute to technical direction alongside the rest of the team.
• Author technical architectural design documents to deliver on our customer’s needs, efficiently coordinate across teams, and ensure our software is reliable, secure, performant, scalable, and maintainable.
• Help 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), 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 mono 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. Identify patterns across teams to anticipate developer’s needs.
• Mentor teammates and other engineers, raise the bar on design and code review, and act as one of several technical voices for engineering velocity and operational excellence.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 8+ years building and operating production services and platform infrastructure in modern cloud environments.
• Proficiency with Go (Golang), 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 / LLM-based automation in production, and an interest in context engineering (RAG, memory, tool-calling) at engineering-platform scale.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills; able to work with engineers across the company to identify and automate away repetitive manual tasks.
• A genuine fit with a high-paced, “ship it” culture: self-directed, comfortable with ambiguity, and focused on data-driven improvements to product delivery.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Experience scaling GitHub Actions, Argo Workflows, Buildkite, or comparable build/workflow 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 milestones and running stakeholder feedback loops with engineering teams as customers.

🎁 Benefits

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.

Base Salary Range: $205,000 - $231,000 USD

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

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.