Principal Product Security Researcher

Chainguard

5d • Remote

About The Position

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. This is an individual-contributor Staff role. That means technical leadership, cross-team influence, and owning hard problems.

Requirements

• 7+ years in software engineering, security engineering, or a combined role with meaningful hands-on security responsibility throughout.
• Strong proficiency in Go or Python, with the ability to write, review, and debug production-quality code.
• Deep, hands-on experience with Kubernetes in production (cluster hardening, RBAC, network policies, admission controllers).
• Practical expertise with GCP and/or AWS: IAM, workload identity, secrets management, security services (e.g., GCP Security Command Center, AWS Security Hub).
• Proven track record designing and securing CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Cloud Build, Tekton, or similar).
• Fluency with container security: image scanning, distroless/minimal base images, runtime security.
• Experience with software supply chain security tooling and frameworks (Sigstore, SLSA, SBOM generation).
• Solid understanding of OWASP, NIST, and cloud security frameworks and how to apply them pragmatically.

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with Chainguard Images or other minimal/hardened container base image ecosystems.
• Experience with policy-as-code tools (OPA, Kyverno, Conftest).
• Contributions to open source security projects.
• Background in security research or offensive security (bug bounty, CTF, penetration testing).

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain secure CI/CD pipelines with security gates that catch issues before they reach production.
• Systematically, consistently and automatically capture the risk exposure of Chainguards products.
• Implement and enforce software supply chain security controls: signed artifacts, SBOMs, provenance attestation (SLSA, Sigstore / Cosign).
• Proactively identify emerging customer security needs, and build solutions to meet these.
• Lead security architecture reviews and threat models for Kubernetes-based workloads running on GCP and AWS.
• Harden container images, Kubernetes cluster configurations, and cloud IAM postures — minimising attack surface across our product stack.
• Define and drive adoption of baseline security standards: pod security standards, network policies, workload identity, secrets management.
• Evaluate and operationalise CNAPP / CSPM tooling to maintain continuous visibility into cloud-native risk.

Benefits

• Work remotely with team meetup opportunities, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone and internet costs.
• Receive stock options upon hire and promotion. Plus, you can participate in secondary offerings and have 10 years to exercise your options.
• We cover 100% of your health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents. Nothing comes out of your paycheck.
• Take the time you need – to do our best work, we need to recharge and reset.
• 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents, with the option to use it all at once or throughout your child's first year.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed