Principal Software Engineer, Containers
Chainguard3 hours ago
Remote, United StatesStaff+
Base Salary
$229k - $258k/yr
Responsibilities
- Set the technical direction and architecture for Chainguard Containers’ build pipeline, registry, and adoption tooling over the next one to three years.
- Form and execute roadmaps with engineering and product leaders, including sequencing, staffing, prioritization, and delivery of major multi-team projects.
- Own product-level build-versus-buy, re-platforming, scope, and scheduling trade-offs.
- Lead through other engineers by setting design standards, reviewing important designs and code, and developing Staff and Senior engineers.
- Build and operate systems involving hardened container images, registries, image distribution, signing, migration tooling, and MCP servers.
- Work with AI coding agents and establish safe, effective team practices for their use.
- Collaborate across teams on customer escalations, support issues, planning, and go-to-market feedback.
- Represent Chainguard in open-source, standards, speaking, and customer engagements.
- Maintain observability, on-call readiness, and structural reliability improvements for owned systems.
Requirements
- 10+ years building and operating software used by paying customers.
- Several years serving as the technical lead for large, multi-team projects at a startup or hyper-growth company.
- Relevant experience with container images, container registries, the OCI image format, Linux distributions, package management, build systems, or software supply chain security.
- A visible technical track record through open-source maintenance, standards work, talks, writing, or widely recognized systems.
- Experience setting technical direction without formal management authority and executing roadmaps with engineering and product leaders.
- Strong product-level judgment, systems thinking, initiative, and technical leadership ability.
- Architectural depth in Go, including designing Go services from scratch, plus API design, databases, caching, and GCP or AWS cloud infrastructure.
- Daily use of agentic coding tools and experience changing team practices through AI-native development.
- Excellent written English and experience leading on a distributed, remote-first team.
- Preferred qualifications include software supply chain security experience with SBOMs, Sigstore, or SLSA; contributions to Wolfi, apko, melange, containerd, Kubernetes, or OCI projects; product adoption experience; and Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code experience.
Benefits
- Remote-first work with team meetups, biannual destination summits, and a monthly coworking, phone, and internet stipend; the United States is preferred, with the role also open to Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany.
- Stock options upon hire and promotion, participation in secondary offerings, and a 10-year exercise window.
- 100% company-paid health, vision, and dental insurance premiums for employees and dependents.
- Flexible time off.
- Paid parental leave of 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents.
- Visa sponsorship and relocation are not provided for this role.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Chainguard
Chainguard provides secure, hardened container images and production-ready builds of open source software for enterprises and developers, typically sold via subscriptions and support. Its offerings include Chainguard Images and tools for software supply chain security; the company also maintains Wolfi, a container-focused Linux distribution. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Kirkland, WA, Chainguard’s customers include organizations such as OpenAI, Snowflake, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.