Senior Manager, Engineering (Container Product Engineering) - 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.

Role Overview

Chainguard Containers is our core product, and we're hiring the leader for the team that builds it. As Senior Engineering Manager for Container Product Engineering, you will lead a team of about fifteen engineers who design and ship the features, services, and build systems behind Chainguard Containers. This is a Director-track role reporting directly to the VP of Engineering for Containers, Libraries, and Repositories.

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. Your team builds that foundation: the hardened container images, the registry that serves them, and the tooling that lets engineers and AI agents adopt them.

You will own the team's outcomes end to end: the people, the roadmap partnership with Product, the technical bar, and delivery. The team is senior, with several Staff engineers and a Principal engineer, so this is a job for someone who leads through clarity and judgment rather than process.

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 so agents can discover and pull our images directly.

What You'll Do

• Team Leadership: Lead and manage the Container Product Engineering team, setting clear goals, managing performance, and running a healthy operating cadence. Organize the team into small sub-teams of 2-4 engineers with clear project ownership.
• Grow Engineers: Coach a senior-heavy team (including Staff and Principal engineers). Give direct feedback, build career paths, handle underperformance early and humanely, and partner with Recruiting to hire and calibrate the bar.
• Product Partnership: Work with Containers Product Managers and Technical Program Managers to turn product requirements into outcomes and projects. Insist on clear design docs before cycle starts.
• Technical Direction & Quality: Hold the technical bar. Review designs and PRs, and make or assign the final call on contested technical decisions.
• Hands-On Contribution: Read code, review pull requests, and ship occasionally. Know systems well enough to spot drift early and ask hard questions.
• AI-Native Operating Model: Lead the team's adoption of agentic coding tools across design, implementation, review, and operations with appropriate safety guardrails.
• Forecasting & Planning: Plan work and headcount, commit to dates, report status accurately, and escalate risks early.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with Guarded OS, Customer Platform, Developer Platform, Sales, Customer Success, Support, and directly with key customers.
• Growing Scope: Take on broader organizational scope across Containers as the team and product scale. This role is on the Director track.

What We're Looking For

• 10+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years managing engineering teams that build customer-facing products.
• Experience leading senior engineers (Staff and Principal level) on a team of 10 or more.
• Proven track record of shipping features to paying customers at a company in hyper-growth.
• Strategic mindset to plan capacity, anticipate scaling bottlenecks, and align technical work with business objectives.
• Hands-on, action-biased approach—you still read code and review pull requests without enforcing bureaucracy.
• Low ego, transparent communication style, and high accountability.
• Experience adopting agentic coding tools daily in engineering workflows.
• Technical fluency with containers, OCI image format, container registries, Kubernetes, Go microservices, and GCP or AWS cloud infrastructure. Linux distribution or packaging experience is a plus.
• Track record of leading distributed, remote-first teams across North America and Europe with strong written communication skills.
• Location preference: Remote in North America or the United Kingdom.

Base Salary Range

$229,000 — $258,000 USD

Benefits & Perks

• Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Work remotely with team meetup opportunities, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking, phone, and internet.
• Equity: Stock options upon hire and promotion with secondary market participation and a 10-year exercise window.
• 100% Covered Health Insurance: 100% coverage for health, vision, and dental premiums for you and your dependents.
• Flexible Time Off: Unlimited flexible PTO to recharge.
• Paid Parental Leave: 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents.