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Salary: USD 229,000 - 258,000 / annual
Chainguard is the trusted source for hardened, secure, production-ready builds of open-source software. The company serves Fortune 500 enterprises and global leaders including OpenAI, Snap, Snowflake, and HPE, and is backed by top-tier VCs including Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and Lightspeed.
As Principal Software Engineer for Containers, you will be the most senior individual contributor on a ~15-person team, setting technical direction and leading the company's largest, most consequential projects from conception to customer adoption. This is a technical leadership role, not a management role. You will work directly with engineering and product leaders to shape the roadmap, then lead engineers across sub-teams to execute it while staying hands-on: writing and reviewing code every week, with the hardest problems landing on your desk first.
The Containers team owns the core product: hardened container images, the registry that serves them, and tooling for adoption. Specific ownership includes product features (custom image composition, Helm charts, compliance dashboards like STIG), the image build pipeline (turning Wolfi packages into signed, attested images at scale), registry performance and distribution (lazy loading, Sigstore signing), and adoption tooling (Dockerfile migration, MCP servers for AI agents).
Key responsibilities: Set technical direction for the build pipeline, registry, and adoption tooling over 1–3 years. Form and execute the roadmap with engineering and product leaders, turning ambiguous business goals into sequenced technical plans and owning delivery of large multi-team projects. Make and own product-level trade-offs (build vs. buy, re-platforming decisions, scope cuts). Lead through other engineers by setting design bars, reviewing critical designs and code, and growing Staff and Senior engineers into technical leaders. Work with AI coding agents as part of your build and review process, and set standards for safe team adoption. Follow problems across team and company boundaries. Represent Chainguard in the container and open-source ecosystem through upstream work, standards conversations, and customer engagement. Maintain system health through observability, on-call, and structural incident prevention.
Requirements:
- 10+ years building and operating software for paying customers, including several years as technical lead of large multi-team projects at a startup or hyper-growth company
- Closely relevant experience: container images, OCI image format, container registries, Linux distributions, package management, build systems, or software supply chain security
- Known in the field: visible open-source work, shaped standards, published talks/writing, or systems the industry recognizes you built
- Track record of technical leadership without authority: set direction for teams you did not manage, and they delivered
- Experience forming and executing roadmaps with engineering and product leaders, including saying no, re-sequencing, and holding dates
- Judgment on product-level trade-offs; demonstrated calls that moved a company's roadmap
- Systems thinker who designs for the whole path (source through build, signing, distribution, runtime) and sees second-order effects
- High agency and urgency; you find a way and unblock others
- AI-native: use agentic coding tools daily and have changed how a team works because of them
- Architectural depth in Go: design Go services from scratch, strong API design, databases, caching, GCP or AWS infrastructure
- Low ego; do what you say, communicate early with bad news
- Excellent written English and experience leading distributed, remote-first teams
Nice to haves: Deep software supply chain security background (SBOMs, Sigstore, SLSA); maintainer of or significant contributor to Wolfi, apko, melange, containerd, Kubernetes, or OCI specs; experience scaling products from early customers to broad adoption; Terraform or infrastructure-as-code experience; non-traditional engineering background.
About Chainguard
AI / Data / Infrastructure; Legal / Compliance / Risk — software supply-chain security and trusted container images.
