Compensation Manager

About Chainguard

Chainguard is the trusted source for open source. By delivering hardened, secure, and production-ready builds of all the open source software engineers and AI agents rely on, Chainguard helps organizations build faster, stay compliant, and eliminate risk. Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and global industry leaders, including Anduril, Canva, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpenAI, Snap Inc., and Snowflake. Chainguard is venture-backed by leading investors, including Amplify, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mantis VC, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital.

The Role in a Nutshell

Chainguard is hiring a Compensation Manager to join our Total Rewards team as a strategic individual contributor. As the company continues to scale rapidly, this role will serve as a key partner to the Global Total Rewards Manager and the broader People team, helping to define and operationalize our compensation philosophy, reviewing and updating our comp bands as needed, and build a world-class global compensation function. This is a highly cross-functional, high-impact IC role. You will work closely with PBPs, Finance, and Recruiting, and will need to balance strategic thinking with hands-on execution.

What You'll Own

• Lead the annual review of compensation bands, benchmarking against market data (Radford/Pave) and providing recommendations to the business.
• Own and drive the annual Radford compensation survey submission and data output analysis.
• Own compensation planning cycles end-to-end, including bonus and merit cycles, using Pave and/or Workday.
• Partner with Recruiting/PBPs to deliver consistent, competitive offer recommendations and serve as a compensation advisor throughout the candidate lifecycle.
• Support global expansion efforts by establishing competitive, compliant compensation structures across all jurisdictions in which we operate.
• Collaborate with the HRIS team to migrate compensation data from spreadsheets into Workday, improving data integrity and accessibility.

In your first 90 days, you will assess existing compensation bands, support the Radford survey submission, and build relationships with key stakeholders across PBPs, Finance, and Recruiting.

What We're Looking For

• Demonstrated experience in compensation, total rewards, or a related HR function — ideally at a high-growth tech startup.
• Strong analytical skills; comfortable working with large data sets, building models in Excel/Sheets, and translating data into clear recommendations.
• Experience working with compensation survey data (Radford/Pave strongly preferred).
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills — able to present to and influence senior leadership.
• Comfort operating as both strategist and executor; willing to roll up your sleeves and get things done without a large team beneath you.
• Experience with global compensation, including working in or alongside an EOR (e.g., Remote, Deel) is a strong plus.
• Familiarity with Pave and/or Workday is a strong plus.
• Tech startup experience preferred — you're comfortable with ambiguity, fast pace, and evolving priorities.

Base Salary Range

$140,000—$190,000 USD

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.

A Few Of The Benefits We Offer

• Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Work remotely with team meetup opportunities, bi-annual destination summits, and a 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.

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 Global Candidate Privacy Notice.

©2026 Chainguard. All Rights Reserved.

Key skills/competency

• Compensation Manager
• Total Rewards
• HR Function
• High-growth Tech Startup
• Analytical Skills
• Excel/Sheets
• Compensation Survey Data
• Radford
• Pave
• Workday