Staff Software Engineer (Libraries)

About the Role

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 infrastructure-centric role involves building systems and developer tooling used by thousands of engineers, advancing build automation, and improving vulnerability remediation across the npm package ecosystem.

Responsibilities

• Own technical direction and architecture for JavaScript (npm) ecosystem infrastructure, ensuring high-quality and secure build, test, and distribution automation for libraries.
• Design, implement, and optimize systems for automated artifact creation, updates, validation, vulnerability scanning, remediation, and SBOM/provenance generation for npm packages.
• Build and maintain internal developer tools, including bundler plugins, CLI utilities, code generators, and meta-tooling to enhance library and package maintenance workflows.
• Develop and debug integrations for modern JavaScript 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, execute roadmap, and establish process excellence for scalable package maintenance.
• Mentor, review, and enable other engineers by sharing systems knowledge, debugging strategies, and tooling insights.
• Partner with internal teams (Delivery, Sustaining, Platform, Security) to ensure JavaScript ecosystem services meet critical SLAs and SLOs.

Requirements

• 8+ years experience building and maintaining infrastructure for JavaScript/TypeScript package ecosystems (npm) or large-scale open-source projects.
• Proven track 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 such as esbuild, Rollup, Webpack, Vite, Bun, SWC, Turbopack, Babel, PostCSS, Rome/Biome, Deno, and understanding of ESM/CJS/modules tradeoffs.
• 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 Go for build system code (our infra is Go-based), alongside solid experience in JavaScript/TypeScript.
• Demonstrated ability to debug and resolve critical infrastructure and package-building failures at scale.
• Experience with cloud-native technologies and infrastructure, including containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), cloud services (GCP, AWS), and infrastructure as code (Terraform).
• Excellent cross-team communication skills, capable of collaborating with product, engineering, ops, and security teams, and proactively documenting/mentoring.

Nice-to-Haves

• Active contributor to the open-source JavaScript ecosystem tooling community.
• Experience building and distributing software at scale.