Staff Software Engineer, Malware Detection

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

📋 Description

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

• Take ownership of platform architecture, scalability, and reliability.

• Develop measurement pipelines, metrics, and dashboards to enhance detection coverage and precision.

• Establish feedback loops between Engineering and Product Security to facilitate rapid detection evaluation and deployment.

• Create systems for reviewing, escalating, and correcting detections, including large-scale corrections across the ecosystem.

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

• Expand scanning capabilities from Libraries to Containers, Agent Skills, and future artifact types.

• Balance detection quality, performance, extensibility, throughput, latency, and cost considerations.

• Develop deterministic static analysis and AI-assisted reasoning regarding artifact contents.

• Transition emerging-threat detections from research prototypes to production environments.

• Construct APIs and services for investigating, enforcing, and appealing scanner findings.

• Build backend services for policy management and operations at an enterprise scale.

• Operate the scanner in critical customer installation paths, including alerting, queue health, verdict-before-serve guarantees, and incident response.

• Mentor engineers and impact collaboration with Product, Security, Design, and GTM partners.

⛳️ Requirements

• Several years of experience in building and operating production backend or infrastructure systems.

• Proven track record of staff-level ownership and technical leadership.

• Strong proficiency in Go or extensive backend systems experience with the ability to quickly adapt to Go.

• Experience managing highly technical platforms or backend infrastructure that supports multiple products or internal customers.

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

• Solid understanding of software supply chain security, malware detection, vulnerability management, or related security fields.

• Proven success in making engineering design and prioritization decisions in complex and ambiguous technical environments.

• Comfortable with ownership and reduction of metrics such as false-positive rates.

• Experience in deploying and managing production services.

• Strong judgment regarding reliability, observability, and operational trade-offs.

• Experience mentoring engineers and enhancing standards in design and code review processes.

• Excellent cross-functional collaboration abilities with Product, Security, Design, and GTM partners.

🏝️ Benefits

• Work remotely with opportunities for team meetups.

• Bi-annual destination summits.

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

• Stock options available upon hiring and promotion.

• Participation in secondary offerings.

• A decade to exercise stock options.

• 100% coverage of health, vision, and dental insurance premiums for employees and their dependents.

• Flexible time off policy.

• 18 weeks of paid parental leave for birthing parents.

• 12 weeks of paid parental leave for non-birthing parents.

• Option to utilize parental leave in a single block or spread out over the child's first year.