Principal Software Engineer, Containers

The role, in a nutshell

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 (STIG is the US government's hardening standard).
• 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, the standard that lets AI agents call tools) 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 the 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 the trade-offs that shape the product: build versus buy, when to re-platform and when not to, what to cut to hit a date. Write the decision down and bring dissenting engineers along.
• Lead through other engineers. Set the design bar, review the designs and code that matter most, and grow the Staff and Senior engineers around you into the next generation of technical leaders.
• Work with AI coding agents as part of how you build, review, and operate, and set the standard for how the whole team uses them safely as volume grows.
• Follow a problem wherever it goes: another team's service, a customer escalation, a support ticket, or go-to-market data, and work across team and company boundaries to get ahead of planning cycles.
• Represent Chainguard in the container and open source ecosystem: upstream work, standards conversations, talks, and the customer conversations where credibility is the product.
• Keep the systems you own healthy: observability, on-call, and the structural fixes that stop whole classes of incidents.

What we're looking for

• 10+ years building and operating software that paying customers use, including several years as the technical lead of large, multi-team projects at a startup or a company in hyper-growth.
• Closely relevant experience in what we do: container images, container registries and the OCI image format (Open Container Initiative, the standard for container images and registries), Linux distributions or package management, build systems, or software supply chain security.
• Known in the field. Your work is visible outside your employer: open source you maintain, standards you helped shape, talks or writing that other engineers cite, or systems the industry knows you built.
• A track record of technical leadership without authority: you have set direction for a team you did not manage, and the team delivered.
• Experience forming and executing roadmaps with engineering and product leaders, including saying no, re-sequencing, and holding a date.
• Judgment on trade-offs at the product level. You have made calls that moved a company's roadmap, and you can show what you gave up and why.
• A systems thinker who designs for the whole path, from upstream source through build, signing, distribution, and the customer's runtime, and who sees second-order effects before they land.
• High agency and urgency. You find a way, you do not wait to be unblocked, and you unblock others.
• AI-native in how you build and lead. You use agentic coding tools daily and you have changed how a team works because of them.
• Architectural depth in Go: you can design a Go service from scratch, plus strong API design, databases and caching, and cloud infrastructure on GCP or AWS.
• Low ego. You do what you say and say what you do, and you communicate early when the news is bad.
• Excellent written English and experience leading on a distributed, remote-first team.

Nice to haves

• Deep software supply chain security background: SBOMs (software bill of materials), Sigstore signing, or SLSA (Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts, a framework for build integrity).
• Maintainer of, or significant contributor to, Chainguard's open-source tools (Wolfi, apko, melange) or neighboring projects such as containerd, Kubernetes, or OCI specifications.
• Experience taking a product from early customers to broad adoption.
• Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code experience.
• A non-traditional path into engineering. We value people who learned by building.

Location

Remote. United States preferred; Open to Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany. We are unable to provide visa sponsorship or relocation for this role.

Explore Our Work

Dive into the practical side of what we do at Chainguard. These resources provide a hands-on look at our processes and offer an opportunity for in-depth understanding of our product offerings and the technology behind them.

• Chainguard Academy
• https://www.chainguard.dev