Job description
The role, in a nutshell:
Chainguard is seeking an experienced Partner Sales Engineer to join our Alliances team—our very first hire in this foundational role. You’ll play a critical part in advancing our most strategic technology partnerships, driving adoption, and enabling scale across the software and security ecosystem.
Blending technical acumen with business insight, you’ll serve as a key technical leader through every phase of the partner lifecycle. You’ll build demos and integrations, deliver workshops and training sessions, and design and execute co-sell strategies. This opportunity is ideal for someone who thrives in fast-paced, startup environments and is eager to build new programs from the ground up.
This is a unique opportunity to define and expand Chainguard’s engagement strategy with leading technology partners, helping us shape the future of secure software. If you love building from the ground up and want to make a broad impact, this is the role for you.
What you’ll do:
- Act as the primary technical point of contact for strategic technology partners.
- Develop and maintain compelling demos, solution templates, reference architectures, and integration guides.
- Deliver technical workshops, field training, and enablement sessions for partners.
- Translate business objectives into actionable technical engagement plans and measure outcomes.
- Collaborate with alliances, sales, and marketing teams to shape co-sell strategies and go-to-market initiatives.
- Represent Chainguard at partner webinars, conferences, and executive briefings.
- Independently manage select partner relationships from onboarding through to long-term technical success.
What we’re looking for:
- 6+ years of experience in pre-sales engineering, partner engineering, or solutions architecture.
- Extensive experience building and presenting demos, technical enablement materials, and solution content for external audiences.
- Deep understanding of containers, Kubernetes, cloud platforms, and CI/CD tools.
- Creative approach to partner engagement—prototyping integrations and jointly developing solutions that are both technically robust and commercially relevant.
- Comfortable presenting to diverse audiences, including technical teams and executive stakeholders.
- Exceptional written and verbal communication skills.
- Highly motivated self-starter capable of working autonomously and collaborating in distributed team environments.
- Bonus: Experience with Terraform, GitOps, or vulnerability scanning tools.
About Us
Chainguard is the secure foundation for software development and deployment. By providing guarded open source software, built from source and updated continuously, Chainguard helps organizations eliminate threats in their software supply chains.
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.
Chainguard’s mission is to be the safe source for open source.
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 $400 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.
- For a full list of our benefits and rewards, click here.
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, or 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, or 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 Privacy Policy.
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