Staff Software Engineer, Chainguard Harness

Overview

Staff Software Engineer on the Chainguard Harness team, building a product that uses frontier AI models to find exploitable vulnerabilities in customer applications and deliver validated findings with recommended fixes.

What you'll do

• Own major parts of the system end to end, from design through implementation, rollout, and operation
• Build security into the foundation: protecting customer code end to end, least-privilege access, and auditing everything the system and its operators do
• Partner with Product and Security on threat models and reviews
• Make Harness a reliable, observable, production-grade service, making sound long-term tradeoffs around scale, cost, technical debt, and build versus buy
• Work directly with customers, Product, and the field team, joining customer calls and turning feedback into the roadmap
• Raise the bar for the team through design docs, code review, and mentoring, and by showing how AI tooling can help a small team move fast without cutting corners on security

What you'll need

• 10+ years of experience in software development
• A track record of building and operating production services where security and data confidentiality were hard requirements, not afterthoughts
• Experience designing systems that hold confidential customer data end to end
• Experience shipping software into air-gapped, disconnected, or highly restricted environments
• Deep experience with cloud infrastructure on GCP and/or AWS, including IAM, KMS, networking, and infrastructure as code (Terraform)
• Hands-on experience with virtualization and workload isolation, such as KVM, QEMU, Firecracker or Cloud Hypervisor, gVisor, nested virtualization, or bare-metal hosts
• A working knowledge of applied cryptography: envelope encryption, key management and rotation, HSM/KMS-backed keys, and signing
• Proficiency with Go
• Experience with AI tooling and a genuine enthusiasm for applying it to hard problems
• Strong communication skills and proficiency in English, able to explain a security model to an engineer, a security reviewer, and a customer's CISO
• Works autonomously, takes initiative, and asks for help early

Nice to have

• Experience building agentic systems
• A background in offensive security, vulnerability research, penetration testing, or application security, and a sense of what separates a real, exploitable finding from noise
• Experience building and running arbitrary third-party code across many languages and build systems
• Familiarity with vulnerability data and disclosure: CVE and OSV formats, triage and deduplication, and coordinated disclosure
• Experience distributing self-hosted software: Kubernetes and Helm, signed artifacts, SBOMs, and supply-chain provenance
• Experience with GitHub or GitLab app integrations
• Experience evaluating LLM output quality and managing model cost at scale

Details

• Location: United States, remote
• Base salary range: $205,000 to $231,000 USD
• Include the word DiscoTech in the resume