Engineering Manager, Internal Developer Platform

• Chainguard is the trusted source for open source. By delivering hardened, secure
• production-ready builds of all the open source software engineers and AI agents rely on, Chainguard helps organizations build faster, stay compliant
• 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
• 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
• 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 infrastructure automation and GitOps workflows.
• Deep experience with GitHub and/or GitLab administration, workflows, and CI/CD systems

Nice To Have

• Background in Linux distributions or OS-level systems.
• Experience in security-focused organizations or with software supply chain security practices.
• SRE management experience.
• Prior experience at DigitalOcean, Rackspace, or similar infrastructure-focused technology companies.
• About Us
• We live and breathe our company values:
• We are customer obsessed — We focus on delivering solutions to our customers that create value and make their lives better.
• We have a bias for intentional action — We prioritize, plan, try things, and fail fast.
• 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.
• We trust each other and assume good intentions — We're transparent with decisions to empower team members to make well-informed decisions.
• Base Salary Range
• $205,000 — $230,000 USD
• About Us
• We live and breathe our company values:
• We are customer obsessed — We focus on delivering solutions to our customers that create value and make their lives better.
• We have a bias for intentional action — We prioritize, plan, try things, and fail fast.
• 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.
• We trust each other and assume good intentions — We're transparent with decisions to empower team members to make well informed decisions.
• A few of the benefits we offer:
• Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Work remotely with team meetup opportunities, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone and internet costs.
• Our Approach to Equity: 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!).
• 100% Covered Health Insurance: We cover 100% of your health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents. Nothing comes out of your paycheck.
• ∞ Flexible Time Off: Take the time you need – to do our best work, we need to recharge and reset.
• 18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave: 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.
• 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.
• Chainguard is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, reproductive health decisions
• 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
• other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law.
• By submitting your application, you acknowledge that Chainguard will process your personal data in accordance with Chainguard's Global Candidate Privacy Notice .
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