Staff Software Enginner: Fulfillment Automation

Chainguard

5d • Remote

About The Position

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 Staff 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.

Requirements

• 8+ 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)

Responsibilities

• 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.
• Lead and mentor: Guide a growing team of engineers. Set technical direction, review designs, and help teammates level up. Drive outcomes that extend beyond your immediate team.
• 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.

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.

What This Job Offers

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