Staff Software Engineer (Developer Platform)

Chainguard

9h • $205,000 - $231,000 • Remote

About The Position

Chainguard is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join their Developer Platform team. This team is responsible for building the internal infrastructure, automation, and AI tooling, referred to as the “Factory,” that enables Chainguard engineers to ship secure software at scale. The role is high-impact and high-visibility, focusing on eliminating developer toil and accelerating the process from vulnerability identification to hardened artifact delivery. The team owns the end-to-end internal platform, including monorepo CI/CD, the Agentic AI platform (DriftlessAF), shared build infrastructure, and the change validation and review process. A key focus for the year is scaling AI agent capabilities beyond traditional workflows while maintaining safety and review quality. The Staff Software Engineer will own significant parts of these challenges, contribute to team direction, and collaborate with engineering leaders to achieve DORA-aligned outcomes and establish a standardized development path for new and existing products.

Requirements

• 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 Haves

• 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

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.
• Receive stock options upon hire and promotion. Plus, you can participate in secondary offerings and have 10 years to exercise your options.
• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed