Senior Software Engineer, Containers

Chainguard; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Chainguard, the trusted source for open source, is seeking a Senior Software Engineer in Container Product Engineering. You will design and ship the features, services, and build systems behind Chainguard Containers, working in a small sub-team of two to four engineers that owns one project end to end.

This role requires collaborating with Product Managers and customers, making trade-off decisions, and delivering high-quality, secure-by-default container images and tooling.

Responsibilities

• Design and ship features, services, and build systems for Chainguard Containers.
• Collaborate with Product Managers and customers to prioritize and deliver.
• Ensure security-by-default foundations across container images and registries.

Job description

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.

Who we are

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, in a nutshell

Chainguard Containers is our core product, and this team builds it. As a Senior Software Engineer in Container Product Engineering you will design and ship the features, services, and build systems behind Chainguard Containers, working in a small sub-team of two to four engineers that owns one project end to end.

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 build 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 product role. You will work directly with Product Managers and customers, make the trade-off calls on the features you own, and ship them.

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 dis