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Salary: USD 229,000 - 258,000 / annual
Chainguard is a venture-backed software supply-chain security company delivering hardened, secure, production-ready builds of open source software. The company serves Fortune 500 enterprises and global leaders including OpenAI, Snap Inc., and Snowflake.
As Senior Manager of Container Product Engineering, you will lead a team of approximately 15 engineers building Chainguard Containers, the company's core product. This is a Director-track role reporting to the VP of Engineering for Containers, Libraries, and Repositories. The team includes several Staff engineers and a Principal engineer, and you will own outcomes end-to-end: people management, roadmap partnership with Product, technical standards, and delivery.
The team owns: product features for Chainguard Containers (custom image pushes, Custom Assembly, Helm charts, compliance views like STIG dashboards); the image build pipeline that turns Wolfi packages into signed, attested container images at scale; registry performance and distribution (lazy loading, image signing with Sigstore); and adoption tooling for engineers and AI agents (Dockerfile migration tools, MCP servers for agent integration).
Key responsibilities include leading and managing the team with clear goals and healthy operating cadence; coaching senior engineers including Staff and Principal levels with direct feedback and career development; partnering with Product Managers to translate requirements into outcomes; holding the technical bar through design and code review; staying hands-on by reading code and reviewing pull requests; leading the team's adoption of agentic coding tools; forecasting work and headcount; and collaborating cross-functionally with other engineering teams, Sales, Customer Success, and Support.
The role is positioned for growth: as the product and team scale, you will take on broader scope across the Containers organization. You will work with a distributed, remote-first team across North America and Europe.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 10+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years managing engineering teams that build customer-facing products
- Experience leading senior engineers (Staff and Principal level) on teams of 10+; ability to give Principal engineers room while holding them accountable
- Real product engineering depth: shipped features to paying customers at a hyper-growth company; can turn ambiguous product goals into concrete technical plans
- Strategic thinker who scales with hyper-growth products; anticipates bottlenecks, plans capacity and headcount ahead of need, aligns technical work with business objectives
- Hands-on and organized; action-biased; reads code and reviews pull requests; runs tight operating cadence without unnecessary process
- Low ego; communicates clearly and early, especially with bad news; transparent and reliable
- Track record growing engineers and building teams people want to join; experience hiring, coaching, promoting, and retaining strong engineers; handles underperformance directly
- AI-native: uses agentic coding tools daily; has led a team to change how it works because of them
- Technical fluency with containers, container registries, OCI image format, Kubernetes, Go services, and cloud infrastructure (GCP or AWS); Linux distribution or packaging experience is a plus
- Experience leading distributed, remote-first teams across North America and Europe with excellent written communication
- Location: Remote; North America or United Kingdom preferred
About Chainguard
AI / Data / Infrastructure; Legal / Compliance / Risk — software supply-chain security and trusted container images.
