• Own problems end-to-end • Work on hard problems with no existing answers • Collaborate with a team of engineers that are architects or leads

Role Description 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. - 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. Qualifications - 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. Requirements - Author and/or contributor to open-source projects (nice to have). Benefits - Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Work remotely with team meetup opportunities, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone and internet costs. - Our Approach to Equity: Receive stock options upon hire and promotion. Plus, you can participate in secondary offerings and have 10 years to exercise your options. - 100% Covered Health Insurance: We cover 100% of your health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents. - ∞ Flexible Time Off: Take the time you need – to do our best work, we need to recharge and reset. - 18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave: We offer 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents.

• Design, develop, and maintain enterprise-grade applications using C#, ASP.NET, Azure, and modern web technologies. • Create detailed software implementation designs, architecture documentation, and technical specifications. • Develop AI-enabled product features, including intelligent workflows, recommendation systems, automation, natural language interactions, and integrations with AI platforms and APIs. • Build scalable and maintainable web applications and backend services. • Design, develop, and consume RESTful APIs and work with JSON/XML data structures. • Develop solutions that support distributed architectures and asynchronous processing. • Implement machine learning-powered features using proprietary business data and customer datasets. • Follow Test-Driven Development (TDD) practices and create comprehensive unit tests. • Write clean, maintainable, and well-documented code. • Participate in peer code reviews and implement feedback to maintain high engineering standards. • Ensure software meets quality, security, performance, and usability requirements. • Apply software design patterns and architectural best practices, including MVC and MVVM. • Participate in technical planning sessions and provide effort estimates for development initiatives. • Contribute to architecture reviews and implementation planning discussions. • Create and maintain technical artifacts including architecture diagrams, database schemas, entity relationship diagrams, and sequence diagrams. • Help guide technical decisions related to AI architecture, software scalability, and system integrations. • Evaluate AI technologies and recommend appropriate solutions based on product requirements. • Design, build, and implement AI-powered features using Large Language Models (LLMs), machine learning models, and Agentic AI concepts. • Collaborate with Product and Design teams to identify opportunities where AI can improve user workflows and customer outcomes. • Train, integrate, and optimize machine learning solutions using proprietary datasets and business-specific data. • Design reliable, explainable, and scalable AI-driven experiences within commercial software products. • Understand the strengths, limitations, and practical applications of AI technologies and apply them appropriately. • Participate in Agile planning, sprint reviews, and implementation review sessions. • Demonstrate completed work to stakeholders and gather feedback. • Collaborate with Product, QA, Design, and Engineering teams to ensure successful product delivery. • Support software packaging, deployment, and release management processes.

• Own and evolve the architecture of the self-hosted platform across multiple teams — backend services, data pipelines, control logic, and the deployment topology shipped to customers (containerized microservices on bare metal, delivered as an appliance/OVA) — and implement improvements to existing architecture. • Set the standard for high availability and resilience in customer-controlled deployments: clustering, replication, failover, consensus/leader election, and graceful degradation across single-node and multi-node topologies, and drive infrastructure cost analysis and optimization. • Define scalability and capacity-planning strategies that hold across a wide range of customer scale and hardware, and establish frameworks for performance, observability, and operational excellence in constrained and air-gapped environments. • Lead the translation of SaaS/cloud-native capabilities into on-prem architecture, refine vaguely specified complex requirements into robust, future-proof end-to-end designs, and define coding patterns and standards that span multiple teams. • Influence the engineering roadmap, drive medium-to-large initiatives that span teams, mentor staff and senior engineers, and act as a cross-team technical authority sought out to review the work of others.