Senior Software Engineer (Sustaining Automation)

Responsibilities

• ▹Architect the automation platform: design the end-to-end system that orchestrates package creation, test generation, and image building, owning the technical vision
• ▹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: develop CLI tools, services, and integrations alongside the team
• ▹Build quality tooling: develop test generators, validation frameworks, and quality gates that improve customer reliability
• ▹Shape the roadmap: collaborate with engineering leadership to identify the highest-impact problems and participate in long-term planning

Requirements

• ▹5-7 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: 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 have

• ▹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)

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹Base salary range: $157,000–$184,000 USD

About the company

Chainguard is the trusted source for open source, delivering hardened, secure, production-ready builds relied on by engineers and AI agents. Its customers include Fortune 500 companies such as Anduril, Canva, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpenAI, Snap Inc. and Snowflake, and it is backed by investors including Amplify, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Sequoia Capital.