Principal Software Engineer

Chainguard

Lead technical direction for Athena clearing house at Chainguard. Build and scale production-grade distributed systems for secure open source supply chains.

Posted 6/16/2026full-timeRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $220,000 - $258,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

CloudDistributed SystemsGoGoogle Cloud PlatformTerraform

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Set the technical direction for the Athena clearing house by making the hard architectural calls on data validation pipelines, customer entitlement systems, workflow orchestration, upstream reconciliation, OSV publication, and coalition interfaces. Scale the team and the product area.
Define and drive the transition from rapid prototyping to a sustainable, production-grade product stack including observability, incident handling, and operational rigor
Partner with staff engineers to establish domain ownership and technical standards across the team
Lead the design of systems that process unstructured vulnerability reports from enterprise customers, deduplicate findings, and surface clean signals to the libraries remediation team
Identify and retire technical debt introduced during the team's high-velocity prototyping phase
Serve as a thought partner on build-vs-buy decisions, capacity planning, and long-term architectural bets
Contribute to a hiring bar that brings in engineers who can sustain serious output without burning out

Requirements

What you’ll need

A track record of setting technical direction for complex, production-facing distributed systems raising the entire team's ceiling
Deep fluency in Go and experience with GCP and Terraform is a must; polyglot engineers who can pick up new stacks quickly are welcome
Ability to work with messy, unstructured data validating, deduplicating, and extracting signal from real-world enterprise inputs
Experience transitioning teams from fast-moving prototypes to maintainable systems, monitoring, alerting, SLOs, on-call
You've built systems that handle multiple customer types with different entitlements, access levels, and interaction patterns
Comfort operating across the full backend stack workflows, data pipelines, APIs with minimal hand-holding
Opinions about cost-efficient AI usage and resource allocation are a plus
Prior background in security-adjacent domains (supply chain, vulnerability management, cloud security)

Benefits

Comp & perks

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 (yes, you read that correctly: 10 years!).
100% Covered Health Insurance: We cover 100% of your health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents. Nothing comes out of your paycheck.
∞ 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, with the option to use it all at once or throughout your child's first year.

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

GoGCPTerraformdata validationworkflow orchestrationincident handlingoperational rigormonitoringalertingAPIs

Soft Skills

leadershiptechnical directioncollaborationcapacity planningproblem-solvingteam scalingthought partnershipcommunicationdecision-makingsustainability