Senior Manager, Engineering (Container Product Engineering)

Chainguard

16h • $229,000 - $258,000 • 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. Chainguard is growing explosively. Every line of code is now written with AI in the loop, which means the foundation it runs on has to be secure by default. This role leads the team that builds that foundation: the hardened container images, the registry that serves them, and the tooling that lets engineers and AI agents adopt them. The leader will own the team's outcomes end to end: the people, the roadmap partnership with Product, the technical bar, and delivery. The team is senior, with several Staff engineers and a Principal engineer, so this is a job for someone who leads through clarity and judgment rather than process. The role is on the Director track, reporting directly to the VP of Engineering for Containers, Libraries, and Repositories.

Requirements

• 10+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years managing engineering teams that build customer-facing products.
• Experience leading senior engineers, including Staff and Principal level, on a team of ten or more.
• Real product engineering depth. You have shipped features to paying customers at a company in hyper-growth, and you can turn ambiguous product goals into concrete technical plans.
• A strategic thinker who can scale with a product in hyper-growth. You anticipate what breaks next, plan capacity and headcount ahead of need, and align technical work with business objectives.
• Hands-on and organized. Action-biased. You find a way. You still read code and review pull requests, and you run a tight operating cadence without process for its own sake.
• Low ego. You do what you say and say what you do. You communicate clearly and early, upward and outward, especially when the news is bad.
• You grow engineers and build teams people want to join. A track record of hiring, coaching, promoting, and retaining strong engineers, and of handling underperformance directly.
• AI-native in how you build and lead. You use agentic coding tools daily, and you have led a team to change how it works because of them.
• Technical fluency with containers, container registries and the OCI image format (Open Container Initiative, the standard for container images and registries), Kubernetes, services written in Go, and cloud infrastructure on GCP or AWS.
• Experience leading a distributed, remote-first team across North America and Europe, with excellent written communication.

Nice To Haves

• Linux distribution or packaging experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Lead and manage the Container Product Engineering team, setting clear goals, managing performance, and running a healthy operating cadence.
• Organize the team into small sub-teams of two to four engineers, each with one project and clear ownership.
• Coach a senior-heavy team, including Staff and Principal engineers.
• Give direct feedback, build career paths, handle underperformance early and humanely, and make this a team people want to join.
• Partner with Recruiting to hire, leading interviews and calibrating the bar.
• Work with the Containers Product Managers and Technical Program Manager to turn product requirements into outcomes and projects.
• Insist on requirements and design docs before a cycle starts, and protect the team from mid-cycle churn.
• Hold the technical bar.
• Review designs and pull requests, and make or assign the final call on contested technical decisions while keeping dissenting engineers heard and committed.
• Read the code, review pull requests, and ship occasionally.
• Know the systems well enough to ask the hard questions and to spot drift early.
• Lead the team's adoption of agentic coding tools across design, implementation, review, and operations, with review quality and safety guardrails that hold up as volume grows.
• Plan work and headcount, commit to dates, and report status accurately upward and outward, escalating early when a plan is at risk.
• Work closely with the Guarded OS, Customer Platform, and Developer Platform engineering teams, with Sales, Customer Success, and Support, and occasionally directly with customers.
• As the product and team grow, take on broader scope across the Containers organization.

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