Engineering Manager, Internal Developer Platform

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 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.