Staff Software Engineer, Chainguard Harness

The role

You will own major parts of the Chainguard Harness architecture and guide technical decisions. You will build a reliable, production-grade service that uses frontier AI models to hunt exploitable vulnerabilities in customer applications.

What you will do

• Own major parts of the system end to end, from design through implementation, rollout, and operation
• Build security into the foundation including protecting customer code, least-privilege access, and auditing
• Partner with Product and Security on threat models and reviews
• Make Harness a reliable, observable, production-grade service
• Work directly with customers, Product, and the field team
• Turn customer feedback into the roadmap
• Raise the bar for the team through design docs, code review, and mentoring
• Show how AI tooling can make a small team move fast

Required qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software development
• Track record of building and operating production services where security and data confidentiality were hard requirements
• Experience designing systems that hold confidential customer data end to end
• Experience shipping software into air-gapped, disconnected, or highly restricted environments
• Deep experience with cloud infrastructure on GCP and/or AWS, including IAM, KMS, networking, and infrastructure as code (Terraform)
• Hands-on experience with virtualization and workload isolation, such as KVM, QEMU, Firecracker or Cloud Hypervisor, gVisor, nested virtualization, or bare-metal hosts
• A working knowledge of applied cryptography: envelope encryption, key management and rotation, HSM/KMS-backed keys, and signing
• Proficiency with Go
• Experience with AI tooling
• Strong communication skills and proficiency in English

Nice to have

• Experience building agentic systems
• A background in offensive security, vulnerability research, penetration testing, or application security
• Experience building and running arbitrary third-party code across many languages and build systems
• Familiarity with vulnerability data and disclosure: CVE and OSV formats, triage and deduplication, and coordinated disclosure
• Experience distributing self-hosted software: Kubernetes and Helm, signed artifacts, SBOMs, and supply-chain provenance
• Experience with GitHub or GitLab app integrations
• Experience evaluating LLM output quality and managing model cost at scale

Benefits

• Flexible & Remote-First Culture
• Team meetup opportunities
• Bi-annual destination summits
• Monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone and internet costs
• Stock options upon hire and promotion
• Participation in secondary offerings
• 10 years to exercise options
• 100% Covered Health Insurance for employees and dependents
• Flexible Time Off
• 18 weeks paid parental leave for birthing parents
• 12 weeks paid parental leave for non-birthing parents

Before you apply

• Include the word DiscoTech in the resume

About the company

Chainguard is the trusted source for open source, delivering hardened, secure, and production-ready builds. They help organizations build faster, stay compliant, and eliminate risk.