Principal Software Engineer, Containers - Chainguard

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

Chainguard Containers is our core product, and this team builds it. As Principal Software Engineer in Container Product Engineering, you will be the most senior individual contributor on a team of about fifteen engineers, setting the technical direction for the product and leading its largest, most consequential projects from idea to customer.

Chainguard is growing explosively. Every line of code is now written with AI in the loop, which means the foundation it runs on has to be secure by default. You will shape that foundation: the hardened container images, the registry that serves them, and the tooling that lets engineers and AI agents adopt them.

This is a technical leadership role, not a management role. You will work directly with engineering and product leaders to form the roadmap, then lead engineers across sub-teams to execute it. You will stay hands-on: you write and review code every week, and the hardest problems land on your desk first.

What the Team Owns

• Product features for Chainguard Containers: Letting customers push their own images to our registry, Custom Assembly (customers compose images from our hardened packages), Helm charts, notifications, and compliance views such as STIG dashboards.
• The image build pipeline: The systems that turn packages from Wolfi, our Linux distribution, into signed and attested container images at scale, including moving image builds onto our own runner infrastructure.
• Registry performance and distribution: Work such as lazy loading, so a container starts before its whole image has downloaded, and image signing with Sigstore.
• Adoption tooling for engineers and AI agents: Migration tools that convert existing Dockerfiles to Chainguard Containers, and MCP servers (Model Context Protocol) so agents can discover and pull our images directly.

What You'll Do

• Set the technical direction for Chainguard Containers: the architecture of the build pipeline, the registry, and adoption tooling over the next one to three years, written down and defended in the open.
• Form the roadmap with engineering and product leaders, then execute it. Turn ambiguous business goals into sequenced, staffed technical plans, and own the delivery of the largest multi-team projects from concept through production and adoption.
• Make and own trade-offs that shape the product: build versus buy, when to re-platform and when not to, and what to cut to hit a date. Write decisions down and bring dissenting engineers along.
• Lead through other engineers. Set the design bar, review critical designs and code, and mentor Staff and Senior engineers into the next generation of technical leaders.
• Work with AI coding agents as part of how you build, review, and operate, setting standards for safe team-wide adoption.
• Follow problems wherever they go: cross-team services, customer escalations, support tickets, or go-to-market data to get ahead of planning cycles.
• Represent Chainguard in the container and open source ecosystem via upstream work, standards conversations, talks, and strategic customer conversations.
• Maintain operational excellence: observability, on-call participation, and structural fixes that eliminate whole classes of incidents.

What We're Looking For

• 10+ years building and operating software used by paying customers, including several years as the technical lead of large, multi-team projects at a startup or high-growth company.
• Closely relevant domain experience: container images, container registries, OCI image format, Linux distributions or package management, build systems, or software supply chain security.
• Strong external visibility: maintained open source projects, shaped industry standards, published talks/writing, or known production systems.
• Proven track record of technical leadership without authority: setting direction and driving execution for teams you do not directly manage.
• Experience defining and delivering product roadmaps alongside engineering and product leaders.
• High-level product judgment and the ability to articulate trade-offs clearly.
• Systems-thinking mindset across source code, build, signing, distribution, and runtime environments.
• High agency, urgency, and proactive problem-solving capabilities.
• AI-native mindset: daily usage of agentic coding tools with an understanding of how to transform team workflows.
• Deep architectural expertise in Go, API design, databases, caching, and cloud infrastructure (GCP or AWS).
• Collaborative, low-ego demeanor with early and transparent communication.
• Excellent written English and substantial experience leading within distributed, remote-first teams.

Nice to Haves

• Deep software supply chain security background (SBOMs, Sigstore, SLSA).
• Maintainer or significant contributor status in Chainguard open-source tools (Wolfi, apko, melange) or neighboring ecosystems (containerd, Kubernetes, OCI specifications).
• Experience driving product adoption from early stage to enterprise scale.
• Infrastructure-as-code experience with Terraform or similar tools.
• Non-traditional engineering backgrounds and self-taught builders.

Benefits

• Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Remote work with team meetups, bi-annual summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone, and internet.
• Equity Approach: Stock options upon hire and promotion, secondary offering participation, and a 10-year exercise window.
• Comprehensive Health Coverage: 100% employer-covered health, vision, and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents.
• Flexible Time Off: Unlimited PTO policy to reset and recharge.
• Paid Parental Leave: 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents.