Engineering Manager, Internal Developer Platform at Chainguard
United States
$205k - $230k
<div class="content-intro"><p>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. <br><br>Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and global industry leaders, including Anduril, Canva, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpenAI, Snap Inc., and Snowflake. <br><br>Chainguard is venture-backed by leading investors, including Amplify, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mantis VC, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital.</p></div><h1><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Engineering Manager, Internal Developer Platform: Builder of Golden Paths</span></h1> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Protecting the software supply chain is one of the most important challenges in technology. At Chainguard, we're building the secure foundation that modern software depends on. Our products help organizations eliminate entire classes of software supply chain risk while enabling developers to move faster, not slower.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">We're a remote-first company built by industry experts who believe security, reliability, and developer experience should work together. Our engineering culture emphasizes ownership, craftsmanship, continuous learning, and a relentless focus on customer outcomes.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">If you're excited about solving hard technical problems at scale and building teams that deliver exceptional results, we'd love to talk.</span></p> <h2><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The role, in a nutshell: </span></h2> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Chainguard is hiring an Engineering Manager to lead our Internal Developer Platform team — the group that owns CI/CD, developer tooling, infrastructure automation, and our emerging Agentic Engineering Platform, which lets engineers and AI agents build software together. You'll lead a mature team of senior platform and infrastructure engineers, set the technical roadmap for developer productivity and AI-native engineering, and make sure every engineer at Chainguard can ship software quickly, safely, and with less friction.</span></p> <h2><span style="font-size: 12pt;">About the role: </span></h2> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Do you believe great infrastructure should disappear into the background? Do you enjoy helping engineers move faster, safer, and with less friction? Do you thrive leading highly experienced engineers who care deeply about reliability, automation, and developer experience?</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">We are seeking an Engineering Manager to lead our Internal Developer Platform team.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">This team owns the systems, tooling, automation, and workflows that power engineering productivity across Chainguard. From CI/CD and developer environments to infrastructure automation and deployment workflows, this team enables every engineer in the company to deliver software quickly and safely.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">As Chainguard continues its evolution into an AI-first engineering organization, this team is responsible for building the platforms, golden paths, and guardrails that allow engineers and AI agents to collaborate throughout the software development lifecycle.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Reporting to the Senior Director of Platform & Integrations, you will lead a mature, highly skilled team of platform and infrastructure engineers focused on delivering world-class developer experience.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">This role is ideal for a technical leader who understands modern platform engineering, has strong SRE instincts, and enjoys helping senior engineers operate at their highest level.</span></p> <h2><span style="font-size: 12pt;">You Will Be Responsible For: </span></h2> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Developer Experience</strong> Making engineers more productive every day by continuously improving the systems, workflows, tooling, and AI capabilities that support software development across Chainguard.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Golden Paths</strong> Creating opinionated, self-service platform capabilities and AI-native engineering workflows that allow engineers to focus on solving customer problems rather than managing infrastructure or repetitive engineering tasks.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>CI/CD Excellence</strong> Owning and evolving our software delivery systems, ensuring builds, testing, releases, and deployments are fast, reliable, secure, and scalable.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Platform Reliability</strong> Driving operational excellence through SLOs, observability, automation, capacity planning, and continuous improvement.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Agentic Engineering Platform</strong> Own and evolve Chainguard's Agentic Engineering Platform, enabling engineers to leverage AI across the software development lifecycle. Build the shared infrastructure, tooling, context management, evaluation frameworks, and guardrails that make AI-assisted engineering secure, scalable, and effective.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Team Leadership</strong> Leading a highly experienced team of senior engineers. Removing obstacles, creating clarity, and fostering an environment where engineers can do exceptional work.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Infrastructure Automation</strong> Advancing Infrastructure as Code, GitOps, and platform automation initiatives that improve consistency and reduce operational burden.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Technical Strategy</strong> Define and execute the roadmap for both the Internal Developer Platform and the Agentic Engineering Platform, balancing short-term engineering needs with long-term investments in developer productivity, AI capabilities, reliability, and security.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Cross-Functional Collaboration</strong> Partnering closely with application teams, security teams, and engineering leadership to understand developer needs and prioritize platform investments.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Incident Leadership</strong> Participating in operational reviews, postmortems, and continuous improvement efforts while promoting a strong reliability culture.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>AI Engineering Enablement</strong> Drive the adoption of AI across Engineering. Partner with engineering teams to identify opportunities, establish best practices, and continuously improve developer productivity through AI.</span></p> <h2><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Qualifications: </span></h2> <h3><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Engineering Leadership</span></h3> <ul> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Experience managing software, infrastructure, platform, or SRE teams.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Proven success leading highly experienced engineers.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Strong coaching, communication, and organizational skills.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Champion AI adoption across Engineering by leading through example. Engineering leaders are expected to actively use AI in their own workflows and help their teams continuously improve how they leverage AI to deliver better software. We believe in the Token Rule for Engineering Leadership: managers should remain hands-on enough with AI tooling to effectively coach their teams while focusing on maximizing the organization's overall productivity rather than their own individual output.</span></li> </ul> <h3><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Platform Engineering</span></h3> <ul> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Experience building and operating Internal Developer Platforms, Developer Portals, or similar engineering productivity systems.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Deep understanding of platform engineering principles and developer experience best practices.</span></li> </ul> <h3><span style="font-size: 12pt;">AI-First Engineering</span></h3> <ul> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Experience introducing AI-assisted software development into engineering organizations.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Familiarity with coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar tools.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Understanding of context engineering, evaluation frameworks, and operating AI-assisted development workflows.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Passion for improving engineering productivity through AI.</span></li> </ul> <h3><span style="font-size: 12pt;">SRE & Operations</span></h3> <ul> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Strong background in Site Reliability Engineering, Production Engineering, DevOps, or Platform Engineering.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Experience with incident management, SLOs, observability, capacity planning, and operational excellence.</span></li> </ul> <h3><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Technical Experience</span></h3> <ul> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Strong Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure experience.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Familiarity with infrastructure automation and GitOps workflows.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Experience operating production services at scale.</span></li> </ul> <h3><span style="font-size: 12pt;">GitHub & GitLab Expertise</span></h3> <ul> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Deep experience with GitHub and/or GitLab administration and workflows.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Strong understanding of CI/CD systems, repository management, developer workflows, and software supply chain best practices.</span></li> </ul> <h3><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Communication & Collaboration</span></h3> <ul> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Exceptional ability to work across organizational boundaries.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Strong written communication and documentation skills.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Ability to influence without authority and build consensus across diverse teams.</span></li> </ul> <h2><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Bonus Points</span></h2> <ul> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Experience in Linux distros</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Experience in security-focused organizations.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Experience supporting large-scale Kubernetes environments.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Familiarity with software supply chain security and secure software delivery practices.</span></li> </ul> <h2><span style="font-size: 12pt;">What Success Looks Like</span></h2> <ul> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Our engineers love using the platform.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Other engineering teams move faster because of your work.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Reliability improves, friction disappears, and developer productivity increases.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Engineers spend less time on repetitive work and more time solving customer problems through effective collaboration with AI.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The Agentic Engineering Platform becomes a strategic advantage that accelerates software delivery while maintaining Chainguard's high standards for security, reliability, and software supply chain integrity.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Engineering leaders actively model AI-native engineering practices and continuously raise the organization's ability to leverage AI effectively.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The Internal Developer Platform becomes one of Chainguard's strategic advantages, enabling engineers to focus on building products rather than fighting infrastructure.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">And when something breaks, your team already has the automation, observability, and operational rigor to recover quickly and learn from it.</span></li> </ul> <p> </p><div class="content-pay-transparency"><div class="pay-input"><div class="title">Base Salary Range</div><div class="pay-range"><span>$205,000</span><span class="divider">—</span><span>$230,000 USD</span></div></div></div><div class="content-conclusion"><h3>About Us</h3> <p>We live and breathe our company values:</p> <ul> <li>We are customer obsessed — We focus on delivering solutions to our customers that create value and make their lives better.</li> <li>We have a bias for intentional action — We prioritize, plan, try things, and fail fast.</li> <li>We don't take ourselves too seriously (but we do serious work) — We are solving an important problem which takes focus, but we also like to enjoy the journey.</li> <li>We trust each other and assume good intentions — We're transparent with decisions to empower team members to make well informed decisions.</li> </ul> <p>A few of the benefits we offer:</p> <ul> <li><strong>Flexible & Remote-First Culture:</strong> Work remotely with team meetup opportunities, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone and internet costs.</li> <li><strong>Our Approach to Equity:</strong> 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!).</li> <li><strong>100% Covered Health Insurance:</strong> We cover 100% of your health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents. Nothing comes out of your paycheck.</li> <li><strong>∞ Flexible Time Off:</strong> Take the time you need – to do our best work, we need to recharge and reset.</li> <li><strong>18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave:</strong> 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.</li> </ul> <p>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.</p> <p>Chainguard is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, reproductive health decisions, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, political views or activity, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law.</p> <p>By submitting your application, you acknowledge that Chainguard will process your personal data in accordance with <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.chainguard.dev/legal/candidate-privacy-notice">Chainguard's Global Candidate Privacy Notice</a></span>.</p> <p>©2026 Chainguard. All Rights Reserved.</p></div>
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