Staff Software Engineer (Repositories)

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Own the technical direction for key parts of Chainguard Repository: customer-facing registries, APIs and serving systems
• ▹Design, build and operate high-availability backend services in Go, laying the foundation for containers, images and APK repositories
• ▹Lead work on scalability, reliability, observability and load testing for production systems
• ▹Drive technical decisions on repository architecture, service boundaries and operational patterns
• ▹Partner closely with engineers across Chainguard for a cohesive repository experience and more artifact types
• ▹Mentor other engineers, raise the bar on design and code review, act as a force multiplier

Requirements

• ▹8+ years building and operating production backend or infrastructure systems, with clear staff-level ownership and technical leadership
• ▹Strong Go experience, or deep backend systems experience with the ability to ramp quickly in Go
• ▹Experience building or operating customer-facing infrastructure such as package registries, artifact repositories, APIs, or developer platforms
• ▹Experience deploying and managing services in production, with strong judgment on reliability, observability, performance and operational tradeoffs
• ▹Comfort across application and infrastructure layers, including infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform
• ▹Strong systems instincts and curiosity, proactively identifying and chasing down problems
• ▹Excellent communication and collaboration skills in a remote environment

Nice to have

• ▹Experience with package registries, artifact serving, repository products, or adjacent systems such as Docker registries, GitLab package services, Artifactory, Nexus
• ▹Familiarity with software supply chain security concepts such as provenance, SBOMs and trusted artifact distribution
• ▹Open source experience, especially in tooling or package ecosystems
• ▹Experience supporting or expanding multi-artifact repository platforms

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹Base salary: $170,000–$231,000/year
• ▹Flexible, remote-first culture: team meetups, bi-annual destination summits, monthly stipend for coworking, phone and internet
• ▹Stock options at hire and promotion, secondary offering participation, 10 years to exercise
• ▹100% covered health, vision and dental insurance for employee and dependents
• ▹Unlimited flexible time off
• ▹18 weeks paid parental leave for birthing parents, 12 weeks for non-birthing parents

About the company

Chainguard is the trusted source for open source, delivering hardened, secure and production-ready builds that engineers and AI agents rely on. Its customers include Fortune 500 enterprises (Anduril, Canva, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpenAI, Snap, Snowflake); it is backed by leading venture investors.