Principal Software Engineer (Libraries Platform)

Chainguard is the trusted source for open source. By delivering hardened, secure, and production-ready builds of all the open source software engineers and AI agents rely on, Chainguard helps organizations build faster, stay compliant, and eliminate risk. Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and global industry leaders, including Anduril, Canva, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpenAI, Snap Inc., and Snowflake.

The role: At Chainguard, we think the best platform work is invisible: the libraries just appear, the builds just work, and the CVEs quietly regret their life choices. Chainguard's Libraries organization runs the secure, reliable factory that continuously builds, verifies, and serves open-source libraries to customers and internal teams across multiple ecosystems. We're expanding that factory to new inbound ecosystems, while raising the bar on how much of the remediation and build lifecycle runs without a human in the loop. As a Principal Software Engineer on the Libraries Platform team, you'll set technical direction for that expansion. This is a strategic, cross-organizational platform role: you're not just operating the existing factory, you're deciding how it generalizes to ecosystems it wasn't originally built for, and how much of the remediation pipeline - from CVE detection through patch, rebuild, verification, and release - can become fully automated rather than engineer-mediated. Your decisions will shape the platform's architecture for years and influence how every ecosystem team builds on top of it.

What you’ll do:

• Own the technical strategy for multi-ecosystem scaling.
• Define the architecture that lets the Libraries Platform onboard new language ecosystems (.NET, Go, Rust) without re-deriving core services per ecosystem.
• Drive end-to-end remediation automation.
• Push the frontier on novel patch generation.
• Set platform-wide technical direction.
• Make foundational build vs. buy and sequencing calls for bringing .NET, Go, and Rust online.
• Partner at the org level with Ecosystem teams.
• Raise the technical bar across the org.
• Own reliability and scalability at the platform level.
• Get hands-on when it matters.

What we’re looking for:

• 12+ years designing, building, and operating infrastructure for language ecosystems or developer platforms.
• Direct experience standing up or significantly extending platform support for a language ecosystem.
• Strong proficiency in Go.
• A track record of automating away manual remediation steps.
• Deep background in CI/CD, agentic pipelines, cloud-native infrastructure, and IaC.
• Demonstrated ability to diagnose and resolve deep toolchain, compiler, and packaging failures.
• Excellent written communication in a remote, distributed environment.
• A Principal ownership mindset.

Nice to have:

• Software supply chain security background.
• Experience with Linux distributions, packaging, and reproducible build systems.
• Familiarity with AI/ML packaging and infra.
• Experience leading a platform through a step-change in automation maturity.

About Us: We live and breathe our company values: We are customer obsessed, we have a bias for intentional action, we don't take ourselves too seriously (but we do serious work), and we trust each other and assume good intentions.

A few of the benefits we offer:

• Flexible & Remote-First Culture.
• Our Approach to Equity.
• 100% Covered Health Insurance.
• ∞ Flexible Time Off.
• 18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave.

If your experience is close but doesn't fulfill all requirements, please apply. We're building the best team in technology and are focused on hiring "Chainguardians" with unique backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences. Chainguard is an equal opportunity employer.