Staff Software Engineer, Sustaining Automation

Chainguard is the trusted source for open source, delivering hardened, secure, and production-ready builds that help organizations build faster, stay compliant, and eliminate risk. The Staff Software Engineer will provide technical leadership for the Sustaining Automation team by architecting automation platforms, developing AI-powered tooling, writing production Go, improving quality systems, and shaping the squad’s roadmap.

Responsibilities:

• Drive the technical vision: Help set the roadmap and priorities for the squad, partnering with engineering leadership in ongoing planning cycles rather than a single fixed plan
• Architect the automation platform: Design the end-to-end system that orchestrates package creation, test generation, and image building. Own technical decisions that need to 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 build 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
• Mentor and raise the bar: Help less experienced teammates level up, especially where their background is strong in one area (e.g., OS/distro internals or service maintenance) and lighter in another
• Collaborate across a distributed team: Work closely with teammates across time zones (primarily US/Canada, with close collaboration across EU and India-based colleagues on adjacent squads)