Staff Software Engineer (Repositories)
Chainguard
$170,000–$231,000
Jul 17, 2026
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Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior backend engineering role focused on designing, building, and operating the infrastructure that serves open source software artifacts to customers. The work centers on Go-based services, package registries, and APIs that need to run at high scale and reliability, with a longer-term goal of expanding the platform beyond libraries to containers and OS packages. Suited to engineers with deep production backend experience and a track record of technical leadership.
Staff level · 8+ years · Remote · Full-time
Pay in the description: $170,000–$231,000
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 8,000 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 4,800–12,000
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
Go is listed as a hard requirement but with a ramp-up qualifier ('or deep backend systems experience with the ability to ramp quickly in Go'); the alternatives field is left empty because the JD frames Go as the target language — the qualifier speaks to onboarding speed, not substitution.
Terraform is named explicitly in the requirements section as an example of 'infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform'; per policy, the 'such as' qualifier means the requirement (IaC tooling) is a hard gate, with Terraform as the named primary — no well-known single drop-in substitute was named, so alternatives is left empty.
REST/API experience is inferred from the repeated emphasis on 'APIs' and 'customer-facing APIs' throughout the requirements block; no specific API framework is named.
Package registries, supply chain security (provenance, SBOMs), and open source experience all appear exclusively under the 'Nice to have' heading and are marked preferred accordingly.
The posting contains an AI-detection phrase ('bonfires are my jam') embedded in the requirements text; this is an applicant instruction and has no bearing on the extracted requirements.
Ignored 1 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): software supply chain security.
Caller marked this a fully-remote role — scored against the national candidate pool.
Read the full posting
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