Staff Software Engineer (Guarded Containers)

The role, in a nutshell:

The successful candidate will be part of our Containers team, whose mission is to develop new features for our customers, build and improve tooling and infrastructure, and maintain product quality standards for our core product – Chainguard Images. As a Staff Engineer, you'll own critical, technically complex areas of our stack, shape long-term technical direction, and drive outcomes that extend beyond your immediate team. You'll collaborate closely with team members, guide technical decisions, and promote a culture of excellence.

What you’ll do:

• Collaborate with teammates and cross-functional teams to design innovative services and features that enhance the core product, making it more compelling and valuable.
• Develop robust tools and services to continue to improve our image build system as it scales.
• Own high-impact, deeply technical components of the Chainguard stack, serving as the subject matter expert in those areas.
• Participate in long-term planning and roadmap discussions, helping identify the key problems the team needs to solve and ensuring they get solved.
• Mentor engineers and raise the bar for engineering quality across the organization.

What we're looking for:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience
• 10+ years of experience in software development, data structures, algorithms, compilers, Makefiles, and toolchains
• Expertise with containers, container registries, Docker, Kubernetes and its greater ecosystem
• Experience with Terraform or other Infrastructure as Code, and proficiency in creating modules and organizing resources logically for reuse.
• Experience writing services or tools in Go
• Strong communication skills, proficiency in English, ability to work autonomously, take initiative, and seek help proactively when necessary.

Nice to haves

• Author and/or contributor to open-source projects.

Base Salary Range

$205,000 — $231,000 USD

About Us

• We are customer obsessed — We focus on delivering solutions to our customers that create value and make their lives better.
• We have a bias for intentional action — We prioritize, plan, try things, and fail fast.
• We don't take ourselves too seriously (but we do serious work) — We are solving an important problem which takes focus, but we also like to enjoy the journey.
• We trust each other and assume good intentions — We're transparent with decisions to empower team members to make well informed decisions.