Principal Developer Relations Engineer

Open Source has taken over the world of software development; however, the largest trade-off still persists: security. Companies spend an enormous amount of time and resources patching and fortifying open source software in order to ship with confidence & compliance. 

Founded by the industry's leading experts on open source software, security and cloud native development, Chainguard has built the largest library of open source software that is secure by default. Customers including Snowflake, Canva, and HPE rely on Chainguard to build securely with open source software across the organization.

Chainguard is the safe source for open source.

About Us

We live and breathe our company values:

We are customer obsessed - Our true advantage is the strength of our relationships with customers through collaboration, empathy, and responsiveness.  We establish trust as we educate, advocate, and listen to their needs.  Our focus is on delivering solutions to our customers that create value and make their lives better. 

We have a bias for intentional action - We’re a start-up and we need to move fast. However we need to move fast through intentional action to make sure we’re able to deliver quickly and efficiently on what is most impactful to our collective success.  We prioritize, plan, try things, and fail fast.  We think about how what we do impacts other teams and communicate our progress - owning the whole solution from start to finish. If we move fast enough, we can make two or three mistakes, learn, and correct them before competitors even make their first decision.

We don’t take ourselves too seriously (but we do serious work) - Though we are solving an important problem which takes focus and a degree of seriousness, we don’t take ourselves too seriously while we do.  We laugh, have fun, embrace uniqueness, and enjoy the journey. Together.

We trust each other and assume good intentions - We hire great team members and trust them to do their work. We’re transparent with data, news, and decisions - positive or negative - to empower team members to make well informed decisions. Showing up for each other fully means we celebrate each other’s accomplishments as well as give compassionate direct feedback when needed.  We always default to assuming good intentions.

The role, in a nutshell:

As Developer Relations Engineer (Java), you’ll be part of the Chainguard Developer Enablement team, which supports the mission of securing the software supply chain through developer advocacy, product documentation, tutorials, courses, and workshops. Your role is to connect with, inspire, and educate developers about the power of Chainguard. You will also serve as the voice of the community with Chainguard, delivering product feedback and advocating for the developer.

You are an experienced technologist who loves to support others. You get excited about sharing new tools and helping peer developers build effectively. Ideally, you have built production-quality software adhering to security recommendations, and have shared demos and talks at meetups and other events. You will have an opportunity to directly collaborate and innovate across the product and engineering teams to ensure we are supporting and continuing to build solutions that our customers love.

What you’ll do:

• Define and execute initiatives to grow awareness and adoption of Chainguard products
• Build hands-on demos, integrations, technical material, and examples
• Willing to produce written content including documentation to support the team
• Develop educational materials and run developer and customer workshops
• Interact with users where they are, both online (e.g.: Reddit, Stack Overflow, X, podcasts) and in person (conferences, meetups, company talks)
• Listen to, analyze, and disseminate relevant developer insights with the product and engineering teams, influencing the roadmap and product strategy
• Review internal product and engineering design documents from the developer’s perspective
• Speak about Chainguard and related technologies at relevant community events; this includes both conceptual, high-level material and technical, hands-on training
• Review issues and community forums related to Chainguard, smoothing the developer experience and helping solve recurring issues
• Test and QA products and submit bug reports and feature requests that help improve the developer experience
• Collaborate with engineering, marketing, and sales to stay informed on feature work and go-to-market strategies

What we're looking for:

• Strong interpe