Staff Software Engineer, Malware Detection

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Canada.

📋 Description

• Lead the engineering efforts for Chainguard's shared malware scanning platform.

• Take ownership of the platform's architecture, scalability, and reliability.

• Develop measurement pipelines, metrics, and dashboards to assess detection coverage and accuracy.

• Create feedback mechanisms between Engineering and Product Security to ensure rapid evaluation and deployment of detection changes.

• Design systems for reviewing, escalating, and rectifying detections, including bulk corrections at an ecosystem scale.

• Manage scan orchestration, verdict storage, and APIs utilized by consuming products.

• Expand the scanner's capabilities from Libraries to Containers, Agent Skills, and future artifact types.

• Balance the aspects of detection quality, performance, extensibility, throughput, latency, and cost.

• Implement deterministic static analysis and AI-assisted reasoning for artifact content evaluation.

• Collaborate with Product Security to transition emerging threat detections from research prototypes into production.

• Develop APIs and services for investigating, enforcing, and appealing scanner results.

• Construct backend systems for policy management and operations at an enterprise scale.

• Operate the scanner as a critical component in customer installations, ensuring alerting, queue health, verdict-before-serve guarantees, and incident response.

• Work with Product to define customer experiences related to scanner verdicts.

⛳️ Requirements

• Several years of experience in building and managing production backend or infrastructure systems, demonstrating staff-level ownership and technical leadership.

• Proficient in Go, or possess extensive backend systems experience with the ability to quickly adapt to Go.

• Proven experience in owning highly technical platforms or backend infrastructure that supports multiple products or internal clients.

• Familiarity with high-throughput, event-driven pipelines where throughput, latency, and correctness are crucial.

• Strong knowledge of software supply chain security, malware detection, vulnerability management, or related security fields.

• Evidence of making engineering design and prioritization decisions in complex and ambiguous technical environments.

• Comfortable with owning and improving metrics such as false-positive rates.

• Experience in deploying and managing production services, with sound judgment regarding reliability, observability, and operational trade-offs.

• Background in mentoring engineers and elevating the standard for design and code reviews.

• Exceptional cross-functional collaboration skills with teams in Product, Security, Design, and GTM.

• Nice to have: experience in malware detection, static analysis, SCA, vulnerability scanning, package ecosystems, reusable platform capabilities, cloud infrastructure, software supply chain security, enterprise security platforms, AI-assisted security analysis, sandboxing, dynamic analysis, eBPF, gVisor, seccomp, container isolation, Terraform.

🏝️ Benefits

• Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Work remotely with opportunities for team meetups, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone, and internet expenses.

• Stock options granted upon hire and promotion.

• Opportunity to participate in secondary offerings.

• 10 years to exercise stock options.

• 100% coverage of health, vision, and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents.

• ∞ Flexible Time Off.

• 18 weeks of paid parental leave for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents, which can be taken all at once or throughout the child's first year.

• Opportunities for team meetups.

• Bi-annual destination summits.

• Monthly stipend for coworking, phone, and internet expenses.