Staff Software Engineer, Sustaining

Overview

Staff Software Engineer (Sustaining) on Chainguard’s Package and Image Automation team, driving technical vision and building automation systems for keeping packages and container images current.

What you'll do

• Help set roadmap and squad priorities in ongoing planning.
• Design the end-to-end automation system for package creation, test generation, and image building.
• Develop LLM-integrated, agentic pipelines for manifest generation, test scaffolding, and validation.
• Write production Go to build CLI tools, services, and integrations.
• Build quality tooling such as test generators, validation frameworks, and quality gates.
• Mentor teammates and raise engineering quality across the squad.
• Collaborate with distributed teammates across time zones.

What you'll need

• 7+ years of software engineering experience designing and building complex systems.
• Strong Go expertise.
• Experience with AI/LLM integration for code generation, automation, or developer tooling.
• Systems architecture skills for loosely-coupled, scalable designs and trade-offs.
• Experience building developer tools, CLIs, or automation platforms.
• Deep Linux and build systems knowledge including package managers, build tools, and containerization.
• Container ecosystem expertise including Docker, OCI, container registries, and Kubernetes.

Details

• Role is remote in the United States.
• Based in the US or Canada.