Staff Software Engineer (Malware Detection)

Overview

Lead the architecture, scale, reliability, and production operation of Chainguard's shared malware scanning platform. Partner with Product Security to turn threat research into fast, accurate detections across software artifacts.

What you'll do

• Build pipelines, metrics, and dashboards for detection coverage and precision.
• Own scan orchestration, verdict storage, and platform APIs.
• Scale scanning across libraries, containers, agent skills, and future artifact types.
• Develop static analysis and AI-assisted artifact analysis systems.
• Build APIs for investigating, enforcing, and appealing scanner findings.
• Operate the production scanner with alerting, queue monitoring, reliability guarantees, and incident response.

What you'll need

• Multiple years building and operating production backend or infrastructure systems.
• Staff-level ownership and technical leadership experience.
• Strong Go experience or deep backend systems experience with ability to ramp in Go.
• Experience with high-throughput, event-driven pipelines where latency and correctness matter.
• Knowledge of software supply chain security, malware detection, vulnerability management, or adjacent domains.
• Experience with production deployment, observability, reliability, and operational tradeoffs.
• Experience mentoring engineers and influencing cross-functional partners.

Nice to have

• Experience with malware detection, static analysis, SCA, or vulnerability scanning.
• Familiarity with npm, PyPI, Maven, Go modules, or container registries.
• Experience with sandboxing or dynamic analysis, including eBPF, gVisor, seccomp, or container isolation.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and Terraform.

Details

• Remote role in the United States.
• Base salary: $170,000–$231,000 USD yearly.