Principal Software Engineer (Containers)

Chainguard; New York (NY); Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity/stock options

Unlimited PTO

Remote work with flexible coworking

Job summary

Chainguard is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for Container Product Engineering. You will be the most senior IC, setting technical direction, leading multi-team initiatives, and staying hands-on with code weekly.

You will shape the architecture of the build pipeline, registry, and adoption tooling, collaborating with AI tooling to scale secure containerization across customers. You will drive roadmaps with engineering and product leaders, make critical trade-offs, and mentor Staff and

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software development experience
• Proven track record leading multi-team initiatives in a high-growth environment
• Strong experience with containerization, security, and supply-chain tooling

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for Chainguard Containers and its build pipeline, registry, and adoption tooling
• Lead architecture reviews and mentor Senior/Staff engineers
• Write and review code weekly and own the most consequential projects from concept to production
• Form roadmaps with product and engineering leadership and translate business goals into technical plans
• Collaborate with AI agents and tooling to shape secure, scalable workflows

Skills

Go

API design

Software architecture

Distributed systems

Technical leadership without authority

Written English

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

Sigstore

OCI / container specs

Git

Job description

• 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
• 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
• 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

Benefits

• Equity/stock options
• Unlimited PTO
• Remote work with flexible coworking and team meetup opportunities
• Home office and internet stipend
• 100% health/dental/vision insurance coverage for you and your family

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 AWSA 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 landAI-native in how you build and lead. You use agentic coding tools daily and you have changed how a team works because of themKnown 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 builtClosely 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 securityA track record of technical leadership without authority: you have set direction for a team you did not manage, and the team deliveredLow ego. You do what you say and say what you do, and you communicate early when the news is badJudgment 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 whyHigh agency and urgency. You find a way, you do not wait to be unblocked, and you unblock others10+ 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-growthExperience forming and executing roadmaps with engineering and product leaders, including saying no, re-sequencing, and holding a dateExcellent written English and experience leading on a distributed, remote-first teamMaintainer of, or significant contributor to, Chainguard’s open-source tools (Wolfi, apko, melange) or neighboring projects such as containerd, Kubernetes, or OCI specificationsDeep 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)Experience taking a product from early customers to broad adoptionTerraform or other infrastructure-as-code experienceA non-traditional path into engineering. We value people who learned by building