Principal Software Engineer, Containers

Chainguard

3d • $229,000 - $258,000 • Remote

About The Position

The Principal Software Engineer will be the most senior individual contributor on Chainguard’s Container Product Engineering team, which builds Chainguard Containers. This technical leadership role sets the product’s technical direction and leads its largest, most consequential projects from concept through customer adoption. The role is hands-on, with regular coding and code review, and does not involve people management.

The position shapes the architecture and roadmap for hardened container images, the registry that serves them, the image build pipeline, and tooling that helps engineers and AI agents adopt Chainguard Containers. The engineer works with engineering and product leaders to turn business goals into sequenced, staffed technical plans, and leads delivery across sub-teams.

The team’s work includes customer-facing container product features, systems that build signed and attested images from Wolfi packages, registry performance and distribution, image signing, and adoption tooling such as Dockerfile migration tools and MCP servers. The role also contributes to the health and reliability of owned systems, engages with customers and other teams, and represents Chainguard in the container and open-source ecosystem.

This is a remote role. The United States is preferred; applicants in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany are also considered. Chainguard cannot provide visa sponsorship or relocation.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience building and operating software used by paying customers, including several years as technical lead for large, multi-team projects at a startup or hyper-growth company.
• Closely relevant experience with container images, container registries and the OCI image format, Linux distributions or package management, build systems, or software supply chain security.
• Visible contributions or expertise in the field, such as maintaining open-source projects, shaping standards, giving talks or writing cited by engineers, or building systems known in the industry.
• Demonstrated technical leadership without formal authority, including setting direction for a team not managed directly and enabling it to deliver.
• Experience forming and executing roadmaps with engineering and product leaders, including prioritizing, saying no, re-sequencing, and holding dates.
• Product-level trade-off judgment, with examples of decisions that affected a company roadmap and clear explanations of what was sacrificed and why.
• Systems-thinking ability spanning upstream source, build, signing, distribution, and customer runtime, with awareness of second-order effects.
• High agency and urgency, including proactively unblocking oneself and others.
• Daily use of agentic coding tools and experience changing how a team works through their use.
• Architectural depth in Go, including designing a Go service from scratch, as well as strong API design, database and caching, and GCP or AWS cloud infrastructure experience.
• Low ego, reliability in commitments, and early communication when circumstances or outcomes are unfavorable.
• Excellent written English and experience leading on a distributed, remote-first team.

Nice To Haves

• Deep software supply chain security experience, including SBOMs, Sigstore signing, or SLSA.
• Maintainer or significant contributor to Chainguard open-source tools such as Wolfi, apko, or melange, or neighboring projects such as 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, including learning by building.

Responsibilities

• Set and document the technical direction for Chainguard Containers, including the architecture of its build pipeline, registry, and adoption tooling over the next one to three years.
• Form the roadmap with engineering and product leaders and turn ambiguous business goals into sequenced, staffed technical plans.
• Own delivery of large, multi-team projects from concept through production and customer adoption.
• Make and document product-level technical trade-offs, including build-versus-buy decisions, re-platforming, prioritization, and scope choices.
• Lead through other engineers by setting design standards, reviewing important designs and code, and developing Staff and Senior engineers as technical leaders.
• Use AI coding agents in building, reviewing, and operating software, and set standards for safe team use.
• Work across team and company boundaries to address customer escalations, support issues, service dependencies, and go-to-market data.
• Represent Chainguard in the container and open-source ecosystem through upstream work, standards discussions, talks, and customer conversations.
• Maintain the health of owned systems through observability, on-call work, and structural reliability improvements.
• Write and review code regularly.

Benefits

• Remote-first culture with team meetup opportunities, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone, and internet costs.
• Stock options upon hire and promotion, participation in secondary offerings, and 10 years to exercise options.
• 100% coverage of health, vision, and dental insurance premiums for employees and dependents.
• Flexible time off.
• Paid parental leave: 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents, usable at once or throughout the child’s first year.

What This Job Offers

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