Engineering Manager, Internal Developer Platform

Engineering Manager, Internal Developer Platform: Builder of Golden Paths

Protecting the software supply chain is one of the most important challenges in technology. At Chainguard, we're building the secure foundation that modern software depends on. Our products help organizations eliminate entire classes of software supply chain risk while enabling developers to move faster, not slower.

We're a remote-first company built by industry experts who believe security, reliability, and developer experience should work together. Our engineering culture emphasizes ownership, craftsmanship, continuous learning, and a relentless focus on customer outcomes.

If you're excited about solving hard technical problems at scale and building teams that deliver exceptional results, we'd love to talk.

The role, in a nutshell:

Chainguard is hiring an Engineering Manager to lead our Internal Developer Platform team — the group that owns CI/CD, developer tooling, infrastructure automation, and our emerging Agentic Engineering Platform, which lets engineers and AI agents build software together. You'll lead a mature team of senior platform and infrastructure engineers, set the technical roadmap for developer productivity and AI-native engineering, and make sure every engineer at Chainguard can ship software quickly, safely, and with less friction.

About the role:

Do you believe great infrastructure should disappear into the background? Do you enjoy helping engineers move faster, safer, and with less friction? Do you thrive leading highly experienced engineers who care deeply about reliability, automation, and developer experience?

We are seeking an Engineering Manager to lead our Internal Developer Platform team.

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, this team enables every engineer in the company to deliver software quickly and safely.

As Chainguard continues its evolution into an AI-first engineering organization, this team is responsible for building the platforms, golden paths, and guardrails that allow engineers and AI agents to collaborate throughout the software development lifecycle.

Reporting to the Senior Director of Platform & Integrations, you will lead a mature, highly skilled team of platform and infrastructure engineers focused on delivering world-class developer experience.

This role is ideal for a technical leader who understands modern platform engineering, has strong SRE instincts, and enjoys helping senior engineers operate at their highest level.

You Will Be Responsible For:

Developer Experience Making engineers more productive every day by continuously improving the systems, workflows, tooling, and AI capabilities that support software development across Chainguard.

Golden Paths Creating opinionated, self-service platform capabilities and AI-native engineering workflows that allow engineers to focus on solving customer problems rather than managing infrastructure or repetitive engineering tasks.

CI/CD Excellence Owning and evolving our software delivery systems, ensuring builds, testing, releases, and deployments are fast, reliable, secure, and scalable.

Platform Reliability Driving operational excellence through SLOs, observability, automation, capacity planning, and continuous improvement.

Agentic Engineering Platform Own and evolve Chainguard's Agentic Engineering Platform, enabling engineers to leverage AI across the software development lifecycle. Build the shared infrastructure, tooling, context management, evaluation frameworks, and guardrails that make AI-assisted engineering secure, scalable, and effective.

Team Leadership Leading a highly experienced team of senior engineers. Removing obstacles, creating clarity, and fostering an environment where engineers can do exceptional work.

Infrastructure Automation Advancing Infrastructure as Code, GitOps, and platform automation initiatives that improve consistency and reduce operational burden.

Technical Strategy Define and execute the roadmap for both the Internal Developer Platform and the Agentic Engineering Platform, balancing short-term engineering needs with long-term investments in developer productivity, AI capabilities, reliability, and security.

Cross-Functional Collaboration Partnering closely with application teams, security teams, and engineering leadership to understand developer needs and prioritize platform investments.

Incident Leadership Participating in operational reviews, postmortems, and continuous improvement efforts while promoting a strong reliability culture.

AI Engineering Enablement Drive the adoption of AI across Engineering. Partner with engineering teams to identify opportunities, establish best practices, and continuously improve developer productivity through AI.

Qualifications:

Engineering Leadership

Experience managing software, infrastructure, platform, or SRE teams.

Proven success leading highly experienced engineers.

Strong coaching, communication, and organizational skills.

Champion AI adoption across Engineering by leading through example. Engineering leaders are expected to actively use AI in their own workflows and help their teams continuously improve how they leverage AI to deliver better software. We believe in the Token Rule for Engineering Leadership: managers should remain hands-on enough with AI tooling to effectively coach their teams while focusing on maximizing the organization's overall productivity rather than their own individual output.

Platform Engineering

Experience building and operating Internal Developer Platforms, Developer Portals, or similar engineering productivity systems.

Deep understanding of platform engineering principles and developer experience best practices.

AI-First Engineering

Experience introducing AI-assisted software development into engineering organizations.

Familiarity with coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar tools.

Understanding of context engineering, evaluation frameworks, and operating AI-assisted development workflows.

Passion for improving engineering productivity through AI.

SRE & Operations

Strong background in Site Reliability Engineering, Production Engineering, DevOps, or Platform Engineering.

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.

Experience operating production services at scale.

GitHub & GitLab Expertise

Deep experience with GitHub and/or GitLab administration and workflows.

Strong understanding of CI/CD systems, repository management, developer workflows, and software supply chain best practices.

Communication & Collaboration

Exceptional ability to work across organizational boundaries.

Strong written communication and documentation skills.

Ability to influence without authority and build consensus across diverse teams.

Bonus Points

Experience in Linux distros

Experience in security-focused organizations.

Experience supporting large-scale Kubernetes environments.

Familiarity with software supply chain security and secure software delivery practices.

What Success Looks Like

Our engineers love using the platform.

Other engineering teams move faster because of your work.

Reliability improves, friction disappears, and developer productivity increases.

Engineers spend less time on repetitive work and more time solving customer problems through effective collaboration with AI.

The Agentic Engineering Platform becomes a strategic advantage that accelerates software delivery while maintaining Chainguard's high standards for security, reliability, and software supply chain integrity.

Engineering leaders actively model AI-native engineering practices and continuously raise the organization's ability to leverage AI effectively.

The Internal Developer Platform becomes one of Chainguard's strategic advantages, enabling engineers to focus on building products rather than fighting infrastructure.

And when something breaks, your team already has the automation, observability, and operational rigor to recover quickly and learn from it.

Base Salary Range

$205,000—$230,000 USD