Job Description
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. Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and global industry leaders, including Anduril, Canva, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpenAI, Snap Inc., and Snowflake. Chainguard is venture-backed by leading investors, including Amplify, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mantis VC, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital. The role, in a nutshell: The Engineering Manager, Internal Developer Platform is the builder of golden paths at Chainguard. This is a people-first, technically credible leadership role for someone who believes great infrastructure should disappear into the background — empowering engineers to move faster, safer, and with less friction. 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. Critically, this team is one by one chipping away at a core dependency on third-party infrastructure that has proven unreliable, reimplementing it in a way that Chainguard owns and controls. This is a high-visibility, strategically important team. Reporting to the Senior Director of Platform & Integrations, you will lead a mature, highly experienced team — including multiple principal engineers. This is not a team that needs hand-holding. It needs a leader who knows how to manage senior talent: someone who can set context, remove obstacles, create clarity, and foster an environment where exceptional engineers can do exceptional work. Managing a team with principal engineers means your comp will not necessarily be the highest on the team — a mature manager has seen this before and understands it. We are open to a Manager or Senior Manager depending on experience. The ideal Senior Manager candidate brings 5–10+ years of engineering management experience with a clear upward trajectory. For the manager level, we are looking for 2–3+ years of engineering management experience at minimum. We will not hire an external candidate into this role as their first management position. What You'll Do: Developer Experience Make engineers more productive every day. Continuously improve the systems, workflows, and tooling that support software development across Chainguard. Golden Paths Create opinionated, self-service platform capabilities that allow engineering teams to focus on solving customer problems rather than managing infrastructure. CI/CD Excellence Own and evolve our software delivery systems, ensuring builds, testing, releases, and deployments are fast, reliable, secure, and scalable. Platform Reliability Drive operational excellence through SLOs, observability, automation, capacity planning, and continuous improvement. Team Leadership Lead a highly experienced team of senior and principal engineers. Remove obstacles, create clarity, and foster an environment where engineers can do exceptional work. Manage without micromanaging — set goals and create conditions for the team to execute. Ask once and trust the follow-through. Infrastructure Automation Advance Infrastructure as Code, GitOps, and platform automation initiatives that improve consistency and reduce operational burden. Technical Strategy Help define and execute the roadmap for the Internal Developer Platform while balancing short-term needs with long-term investments. Cross-Functional Collaboration Partner closely with application teams, security teams, and engineering leadership to understand developer needs and prioritize platform investments. What We're Looking For: Engineering Leadership 2–3+ years of engineering management experience for Manager level; 5–10+ years for Senior Manager level. Proven experience managing highly experienced and senior engineers — including principal-level talent. Comfort with the compensation dynamics of managing senior individual contributors. Strong coaching, communication, and organizational skills. Technical enough to read and occasionally contribute to code — this is not a pure people management role. Chainguard managers are expected to stay technically engaged. Platform & Infrastructure Domain Background in platform engineering, SRE, DevOps, or infrastructure — someone with that as a basis will have the right domain expertise to lead this team. Understanding of and appreciation for the open source and security world. Experience building and operating Internal Developer Platforms, golden path tooling, or similar engineering productivity systems. SRE & Operations Experience with incident management, SLOs, observability, capacity planning, and operational excellence. Technical Experience Strong Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure experience. Familiarity with infr
