Principal Software Engineer (Athena)

Chainguard is the trusted source for open source, delivering hardened and secure builds for organizations. The Principal Software Engineer will lead the technical direction of the Athena system, focusing on data validation and the transition to a production-grade product stack.

Responsibilities:

• Set the technical direction for the Athena clearing house by making the hard architectural calls on data validation pipelines, customer entitlement systems, workflow orchestration, upstream reconciliation, OSV publication, and coalition interfaces. Scale the team and the product area
• Define and drive the transition from rapid prototyping to a sustainable, production-grade product stack including observability, incident handling, and operational rigor
• Partner with staff engineers to establish domain ownership and technical standards across the team
• Lead the design of systems that process unstructured vulnerability reports from enterprise customers, deduplicate findings, and surface clean signals to the libraries remediation team
• Identify and retire technical debt introduced during the team's high-velocity prototyping phase
• Serve as a thought partner on build-vs-buy decisions, capacity planning, and long-term architectural bets
• Contribute to a hiring bar that brings in engineers who can sustain serious output without burning out

Requirements:

• A track record of setting technical direction for complex, production-facing distributed systems raising the entire team's ceiling
• Deep fluency in Go and experience with GCP and Terraform is a must; polyglot engineers who can pick up new stacks quickly are welcome
• Ability to work with messy, unstructured data validating, deduplicating, and extracting signal from real-world enterprise inputs
• Experience transitioning teams from fast-moving prototypes to maintainable systems, monitoring, alerting, SLOs, on-call
• You've built systems that handle multiple customer types with different entitlements, access levels, and interaction patterns
• Comfort operating across the full backend stack workflows, data pipelines, APIs with minimal hand-holding
• Opinions about cost-efficient AI usage and resource allocation are a plus
• Prior background in security-adjacent domains (supply chain, vulnerability management, cloud security)