Staff Software Engineer, Chainguard Harness

Role overview Lead major parts of a security-focused software service that uses AI to find exploitable vulnerabilities and provide validated findings with suggested fixes. As a staff-level engineer, you will shape architecture and technical direction while helping move a product from beta toward reliable operation across more customers and restricted environments. Protecting customer source code is central to the system’s design.

Responsibilities - Own system components from architecture and implementation through rollout and operations. - Design protections for customer code, including least-privilege access and comprehensive audit trails. - Work with product and security partners on threat models and security reviews. - Improve reliability, observability, and production readiness while balancing scale, cost, and technical debt. - Work with customers and product teams, turning feedback into product direction. - Guide the team through design documents, code reviews, and mentoring.

Requirements - 10+ years of software development experience. - Track record building and operating production services where security and data confidentiality are core requirements. - Experience designing systems that handle confidential customer data end to end and shipping into air-gapped or highly restricted environments. - Deep cloud infrastructure experience with GCP or AWS, including identity and access management, key management, networking, and Terraform. - Hands-on knowledge of virtualization and workload isolation, such as KVM, QEMU, Firecracker, gVisor, or bare-metal environments. - Working knowledge of applied cryptography and key management, plus proficiency in Go.

Nice to have - Experience with AI tools or agentic systems; security research or application security; running third-party code across varied languages and build systems; vulnerability data; or self-hosted software distribution. - Familiarity with GitHub or GitLab integrations, LLM evaluation, and controlling model costs.

Benefits and work setup - Remote-first work with team meetups, destination summits, and a monthly coworking, phone, and internet stipend. - The listing describes stock options, health, vision, and dental premiums covered for employees and dependents, flexible time off, and paid parental leave.