Staff Software Engineer (Developer Platform)

The role, in a nutshell:

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Developer Platform team, the team that builds the "Factory" powering Chainguard Engineering. We own the internal infrastructure, automation, and AI tooling that lets our engineers ship secure software at scale: monorepo CI/CD, our Agentic AI platform (DriftlessAF), shared build infrastructure, and the change-throughput substrate that every Chainguard product team depends on.

Our mission is to reduce developer toil and shorten the path from a CVE being issued to a hardened artifact in our customers' hands. AI agents are reshaping how change reaches production, and a key focus for this team is scaling that substrate well beyond what traditional PR-based workflows can support — while maintaining safety and review quality. You'll own meaningful slices of these problems, contribute to technical direction, and partner with engineering leaders across the org to drive DORA-aligned outcomes and deliver a standardized paved road for teams to ship on.

What you'll do

• Take ownership of significant pieces of the Developer Platform, across monorepo CI/CD, the Agentic AI platform (DriftlessAF), shared build infrastructure, or the change-throughput substrate, and contribute to technical direction alongside the rest of the team.
• Improve the speed, reliability, and developer experience of the monorepo CI/CD pipeline so engineers spend more time shipping and less time waiting on or debugging builds.
• Contribute to the next generation of change throughput — exploring substrates beyond PR-based workflows for agent-driven changes, helping enable trusted agents to commit directly to main with automated validation, and supporting AI-assisted review and auto-merge for low-risk changes.
• Help productionize the Agentic AI platform: agent observability (structured traces, costs, debuggability), RAG-as-platform so any team can give its agents shared memory, and the context-engineering patterns (skills, tools, memory) that keep agents reliable from dev through prod.
• Work with the team to consolidate fragmented build systems and deliver standardized "paved road" blueprints so new products can onboard to the monorepo and ship to production quickly.
• Partner directly with engineers across the company to identify toil, codify patterns, and automate repetitive manual work away — treating internal stakeholder teams as customers of the platform.
• Mentor teammates, raise the bar on design and code review, and serve as a technical voice for engineering velocity and operational excellence.

What we're looking for

• 8+ years building and operating production services and platform infrastructure in modern cloud environments.
• Proficiency with Go, or strong readiness to ramp quickly.
• Deep technical expertise in CI/CD systems, container-based orchestration, and the tooling required to scale a large monorepo across build, test, and release.
• Experience contributing to technical direction across multiple teams — evaluating tradeoffs, helping deprecate legacy systems, and building alignment around a target architecture.
• Familiarity with Agentic AI and LLM-based automation in production, and an interest in context engineering (RAG, memory, tool-calling) at platform scale.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with a track record of identifying and automating away repetitive manual work alongside the engineers who feel it most.
• Comfort with ambiguity and a focus on data-driven improvements to product delivery — you're self-directed, set a high bar, and thrive in a fast-moving environment where quality and speed go hand in hand. 

Nice to have 

• Experience scaling GitHub Actions, Argo Workflows, Buildkite, or comparable systems at high throughput.
• Experience scaling change-throughput beyond traditional PR workflows — coordinating, validating, and landing high volumes of automated changes.
• Background in developer experience metrics (DORA, SPACE) and building the instrumentation to measure and improve them.
• Experience operating a large Go monorepo and the tooling around it.
• Familiarity with the supply chain security space, container ecosystems (OCI, Kubernetes), or open source software communities.
• Experience publishing internal-platform OKRs and running stakeholder feedback loops with engineering teams as customers.