Principal Software Engineer (Athena)

Principal Software Engineer

Chainguard secures the open source supply chain, the infrastructure underneath the majority of software running in production today. This team is building Athena, the system that makes that possible at enterprise scale. It is the nerve center of that mission: we own the clearing house that takes in vulnerability data from enterprise customers, validates and deduplicates it, and routes it to remediation. This is a principal-level, advisory role for an engineer who has built production-grade distributed systems before, is accountable for strategy and scale, deeply opinionated about data quality, and wants to operate at the intersection of engineering excellence and real-world customer impact.

What you'll do

• 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

What we're looking for

• 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, access control) is highly valued