Staff Software Engineer (Libraries)

The role, in nutshell:

As a Staff Engineer on Chainguard’s Libraries team, you will drive the technical strategy and implementation for our JavaScript ecosystem infrastructure, focusing on secure, reliable, and automated build systems for npm packages and related tooling. This is an infrastructure-centric position -- you will work on systems and developer tooling used by thousands of engineers, rather than frontend development. Your expertise will help expand and maintain Chainguard’s coverage over mission-critical JS libraries, advance our build automation, and improve vulnerability remediation workflows across the npm package ecosystem.

What you’ll do: 

• Own technical direction and architecture for JS (npm) ecosystem infrastructure, supporting high-quality and secure build, test, and distribution automation for libraries

• Design, implement, and optimize systems for automated artifact creation, update, validation, vulnerability scanning, remediation, and SBOM and provenance generation for npm packages

• Build and maintain internal developer tools: bundler plugins, CLI utilities, code generators, and meta-tooling that improve the workflows for library and package maintenance

• Develop and debug integrations for modern JS build systems and package managers.

• Solve complex dependency resolution issues, manage monorepo orchestration, and drive improvements in infrastructure automation

• Collaborate with product and engineering leadership to set technical direction, drive roadmap execution, and establish process excellence for scalable package maintenance

• Mentor, review, and enable other engineers by sharing systems knowledge, debugging strategies, and "meta" tooling insights

• Partner with internal teams (Delivery, Sustaining, Platform, Security) to ensure our JavaScript ecosystem services meet critical SLAs and SLOs

What we’re looking for:

• 8+ years building and maintaining infrastructure for JavaScript/TypeScript package ecosystems (npm) or large-scale open-source projects in a similar domain

• Proven record in building, shipping, and maintaining developer tools – e.g., bundler plugins, CLI tools, code generators, or custom automation pipelines for JS packages

• Deep familiarity with modern JS build tooling: esbuild, Rollup, Webpack, Vite, Bun, SWC, Turbopack, Babel, PostCSS, Rome/Biome, Deno, and the associated tradeoffs between ESM/CJS/modules

• Hands-on experience orchestrating large monorepos (Lerna, Nx, Turborepo or custom setups) and solving infra-scale dependency or module resolution problems in production

• Comfortable working with build system code written in Go (our infra is Go-based), plus solid experience in JavaScript/TypeScript. Other language ecosystems are a strong plus.

• Demonstrated ability to debug and resolve critical infrastructure and package-building failures at scale

• Experience with cloud-native technologies and infrastructure, including containerization (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes), cloud services (e.g., GCP, AWS), infrastructure as code practices (e.g., Terraform).

• Excellent cross-team communication skills: can collaborate with product, engineering, ops, and security teams; proactively document, mentor, and share lessons learned

Nice to Haves

• Active contributor to the open source JavaScript ecosystem tooling community

• Experience at building and distributing software at scale