# Staff Software Engineer

**Company:** [Chainguard](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/chainguard)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $170k – $231k/yr
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** Go, Terraform, APIs, Observability, Scalability, reliability, Infrastructure As Code, Docker, Kubernetes, artifact repositories
**Posted:** 2026-07-17

> Staff Software Engineer on the Repository team building and operating high-scale, customer-facing package registries and artifact-serving infrastructure in Go. Lead architecture for libraries, containers, and APKs with focus on reliability, scalability, and security.

## Job Description

## 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.

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