Staff Software Engineer, Chainguard Harness

Chainguard

7d • $205,000 - $231,000 • Remote

About The Position

Chainguard is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for Chainguard Harness, a product that uses frontier AI models to find exploitable vulnerabilities in customer applications and deliver validated findings with recommended fixes, without requiring model access. The product handles sensitive source code, making security central to its design.

The engineer will own major parts of the Harness architecture and guide technical decisions as the product moves from beta toward a reliable service serving more customers and environments. The role spans design, implementation, rollout, and operation, with a focus on customer-code protection, least-privilege access, auditing, reliability, and observability. The engineer will collaborate with Product and Security on threat models and reviews, work directly with customers and field teams, and help shape the roadmap based on customer feedback. The position also contributes to team quality through design documentation, code review, mentoring, and effective use of AI tooling.

Chainguard describes its culture as customer-obsessed, action-oriented, transparent, and collaborative. It is remote-first, with team meetups, destination summits, and coworking and connectivity stipends. The listed base salary range is $205,000–$231,000 USD.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in software development.
• A track record of building and operating production services where security and data confidentiality were hard requirements.
• Experience designing systems that handle confidential customer data end to end.
• Experience shipping software into air-gapped, disconnected, or highly restricted environments.
• Deep experience with cloud infrastructure on GCP and/or AWS, including IAM, KMS, networking, and infrastructure as code (Terraform).
• Hands-on experience with virtualization and workload isolation, such as KVM, QEMU, Firecracker or Cloud Hypervisor, gVisor, nested virtualization, or bare-metal hosts.
• Working knowledge of applied cryptography, including envelope encryption, key management and rotation, HSM/KMS-backed keys, and signing.
• Proficiency with Go.
• Experience with AI tooling and genuine enthusiasm for applying it to difficult problems.
• Strong communication skills and proficiency in English; ability to explain a security model to engineers, security reviewers, and customer CISOs.
• Ability to work autonomously, take initiative, and ask for help early.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building agentic systems.
• Background in offensive security, vulnerability research, penetration testing, or application security, with an understanding of what makes a finding genuinely exploitable.
• Experience building and running arbitrary third-party code across many languages and build systems.
• Familiarity with vulnerability data and disclosure, including CVE and OSV formats, triage and deduplication, and coordinated disclosure.
• Experience distributing self-hosted software, including Kubernetes and Helm, signed artifacts, SBOMs, and supply-chain provenance.
• Experience with GitHub or GitLab app integrations.
• Experience evaluating LLM output quality and managing model costs at scale.

Responsibilities

• Own major parts of the system end to end, from design through implementation, rollout, and operation.
• Build security into the system, including end-to-end protection of customer code, least-privilege access, and auditing of system and operator actions.
• Partner with Product and Security on threat models and security reviews.
• Make Harness a reliable, observable, production-grade service and make long-term tradeoffs involving scale, cost, technical debt, and build-versus-buy decisions.
• Work directly with customers, Product, and the field team; participate in customer calls and translate feedback into the roadmap.
• Raise the team's bar through design documents, code review, and mentoring.
• Demonstrate how AI tooling can help a small team move quickly without compromising security.

Benefits

• Remote-first culture with team meetup opportunities and bi-annual destination summits.
• Monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone, and internet costs.
• Stock options upon hire and promotion; participation in secondary offerings; 10 years to exercise options.
• 100% covered health, vision, and dental insurance premiums for employees and dependents.
• Flexible time off.
• Paid parental leave: 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents.

What This Job Offers

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