Senior Software Engineer, Containers - 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, and we are venture-backed by leading investors.

The Role

As a Senior Software Engineer in Container Product Engineering, you will design and ship the features, services, and build systems behind Chainguard Containers. You will work in a small sub-team of two to four engineers that owns one project end to end, collaborating directly with Product Managers and customers.

What the Team Owns

• Product features for Chainguard Containers: Custom Assembly, Helm charts, notifications, and compliance views such as STIG dashboards.
• The image build pipeline: Systems that turn packages from Wolfi into signed and attested container images at scale, including moving builds onto runner infrastructure.
• Registry performance and distribution: Lazy loading and image signing with Sigstore.
• Adoption tooling for engineers and AI agents: Migration tools and MCP servers so agents can discover and pull images directly.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and ship new features and services for Chainguard Containers from design through production.
• Own the trade-offs on your work, balancing scope, sequencing, and speed.
• Work with AI coding agents as part of your daily build, review, and operations workflow.
• Keep systems healthy through observability, on-call rotation, and proactive fixes.
• Write clearly and often using design notes, pull request descriptions, and status updates.

What We're Looking For

• 3+ years building and operating software that paying customers use, preferably at a startup or hyper-growth company.
• High agency, urgency, and strong judgment on trade-offs.
• A systems thinker who can reason about the build pipeline, registry, and customer clusters.
• AI-native in your workflow, using agentic coding tools daily.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and changing priorities.
• Strong fundamentals in a systems language (Go preferred), API design, databases and caching, and cloud infrastructure (GCP or AWS).
• Working knowledge of containers, container registries, the OCI image format, and Kubernetes.
• Excellent written English and experience working on a distributed, remote-first team.

Nice to Haves

• Software supply chain security background (SBOMs, Sigstore, SLSA).
• Familiarity with Chainguard open-source tools (Wolfi, apko, melange).
• Terraform or infrastructure-as-code experience.
• Open-source contributor or author.