Staff Software Engineer

What you'll do

• Own the technical direction for key parts of Chainguard Repository, including customer-facing registries, APIs, and serving systems that make Chainguard artifacts easy to consume securely and reliably.
• Design, build, and operate high-availability backend services in Go that serve libraries today and help lay the foundation for containers, images, and APK repositories over time.
• Lead work on scalability, reliability, observability, and load testing for production systems that customers depend on directly.
• Drive technical decisions around repository architecture, service boundaries, and the operational patterns needed to run artifact-serving infrastructure at scale.
• Partner closely with engineers across Libraries, Build Platform, Delivery, Product, and Security to create a cohesive repository experience and unlock support for more artifact types over time.
• Mentor other engineers, raise the bar on design and code review, and act as a force multiplier in a fast-moving team where staff engineers are expected to own meaningful deliverables and help shape how the team works.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience building and operating production backend or infrastructure systems, with clear evidence of staff-level ownership and technical leadership.
• Strong Go experience, or deep backend systems experience with the ability to ramp quickly in Go.
• Experience building or operating customer-facing infrastructure such as package registries, artifact repositories, APIs, developer platforms, or other high-scale serving systems.
• Experience deploying and managing services in production, with strong judgment around reliability, observability, performance, and operational tradeoffs.
• Comfort working across application and infrastructure layers, including service development, cloud infrastructure, and infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform.
• Strong systems instincts and curiosity: you proactively identify problems, chase them down, and improve the platform before issues become bottlenecks for customers or internal teams.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, especially in a remote environment where staff engineers are expected to drive alignment across teams and help turn ambiguity into momentum.

Nice to have

• Experience with package registries, artifact serving, repository products, or adjacent systems such as Docker registries, GitLab package services, Artifactory, Nexus, or similar platforms.
• Familiarity with software supply chain security concepts such as provenance, SBOMs, and trusted artifact distribution.
• Open source experience, especially in tooling, package ecosystems, or infrastructure used by developers at scale.
• Experience supporting or expanding multi-artifact repository platforms across libraries, containers, OS packages, or similar artifact types.

Compensation

Base Salary Range: $170,000—$231,000 USD

Benefits include flexible & remote-first culture with team meetups, stock options with 10-year exercise window, 100% covered health/vision/dental insurance, flexible time off, and 18 weeks paid parental leave.