Principal Software Engineer, Containers

Remote · US · USD 229,000-258,000 · 10+ years experience · Remote · Posted Oct 16, 2026

At a glance

We live and breathe our company values:
- We are customer obsessed — We focus on delivering solutions to our customers that create value and make their lives better.
- We have a bias for intentional action — We prioritize, plan, try things, and fail fast.
- We don't take ourselves too seriously (but we do serious work) — We are solving an important problem which takes focus, but we also like to enjoy the journey.
- We trust each other and assume good intentions — We're transparent with decisions to empower team members to make well informed decisions.
A few of the benefits we offer:

Chainguard is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for Container Product Engineering to serve as the most senior individual contributor on a team of about fifteen engineers.
This technical leadership role involves setting the technical direction for core products, leading large projects, and staying hands-on by writing and reviewing code.
The engineer will shape foundational secure container images, registries, and adoption tooling for engineers and AI agents.

Set the technical direction for Chainguard Containers, including the architecture of the build pipeline, registry, and adoption tooling over a 1 to 3 year horizon.
Form the roadmap with engineering and product leaders and execute it by turning ambiguous business goals into staffed technical plans.
Make and own trade-offs that shape the product, such as build versus buy and re-platforming decisions.
Lead through other engineers by setting the design bar, reviewing critical designs and code, and growing staff and senior engineers.
Work with AI coding agents as part of building, reviewing, and operating, while setting standards for safe usage across the team.
Follow problems across service boundaries, customer escalations, support tickets, and go-to-market data.
Represent Chainguard in the container and open source ecosystem through upstream work, standards conversations, talks, and customer discussions.
Keep owned systems healthy through observability, on-call participation, and structural fixes to prevent classes of incidents.

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 hyper-growth company.
Closely relevant experience in container images, container registries, OCI image format, Linux distributions or package management, build systems, or software supply chain security.
Visible work in the field, such as maintained open source, shaped standards, talks, or writing cited by other engineers.
A track record of technical leadership without authority, setting direction for a team you did not manage.
Experience forming and executing roadmaps with engineering and product leaders.
Judgment on trade-offs at the product level that have moved a company's roadmap.
Systems thinking design skills spanning upstream source, build, signing, distribution, and customer runtime.
High agency, urgency, and an unblocked execution mindset.
AI-native approach using agentic coding tools daily and changing team workflows accordingly.
Architectural depth in Go, strong API design, databases and caching, and cloud infrastructure on GCP or AWS.

Deep software supply chain security background including SBOMs, Sigstore signing, or SLSA.
Maintainer of or significant contributor to Chainguard's open-source tools (Wolfi, apko, melange) or neighboring projects like 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 through building.

Monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone, and internet costs.
Stock options upon hire and promotion with secondary offerings and a 10-year exercise window.
100% covered health, vision, and dental insurance premiums for employees and dependents.
Infinite flexible time off.
18 weeks paid parental leave for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents.

Remote-first culture with team meetup opportunities and bi-annual destination summits.