Senior Software Engineer, Containers

Chainguard

1d • $157,000 - $184,000 • Remote

About The Position

Chainguard is hiring a Senior Software Engineer for Container Product Engineering, the team responsible for Chainguard Containers. In a small sub-team of two to four engineers, you will own projects end to end and design and ship the features, services, and build systems behind the product. The work supports hardened container images, the registry that serves them, and tooling that helps engineers and AI agents adopt them. This is a product role involving direct work with Product Managers and customers, independent feature trade-offs, and delivery to production.

The team builds customer-facing features such as customer image pushes to the registry, Custom Assembly, Helm charts, notifications, and compliance views. It also develops the image-build pipeline that turns Wolfi packages into signed and attested images, registry performance and distribution capabilities such as lazy loading and Sigstore signing, and adoption tools such as Dockerfile migration utilities and MCP servers for AI agents.

The role involves taking work from initial design through production and early customer use; making and communicating scope, sequencing, and quality trade-offs; working with AI coding agents; investigating problems across services and teams; maintaining observability and on-call health; and writing clear design notes, pull requests, and status updates. The position is remote, with the United States preferred and applications also welcomed from Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany. The company cannot provide visa sponsorship or relocation.

Requirements

• At least 3 years of experience building and operating software used by paying customers.
• High agency and urgency, including the ability to work independently and ask for help early when blocked.
• Sound judgment about trade-offs, with the ability to explain decisions and change course when data warrants.
• Systems-thinking skills, including reasoning about changes across build pipelines, registries, and customer clusters.
• Daily use of agentic coding tools and the ability to demonstrate how they have affected work output.
• Comfort working with ambiguity, defining solutions for partly specified problems, and pivoting as priorities change.
• Strong fundamentals in a systems programming language (Go preferred), API design, databases and caching, and cloud infrastructure on GCP or AWS.
• Working knowledge of containers, container registries, the OCI image format, and Kubernetes.
• Low-ego approach, reliability, and early communication, including when developments are unfavorable.
• Excellent written English and experience working on a distributed, remote-first team.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with software supply-chain security, including SBOMs, Sigstore signing, or SLSA.
• Familiarity with Chainguard open-source tools such as Wolfi, apko, and melange.
• Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code experience.
• Authorship or contributions to open-source projects.
• A non-traditional path into engineering.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and ship new features and services for Chainguard Containers from initial design through production and the first week of customer use.
• Own trade-offs around scope, sequencing, and what to cut, and communicate clearly when a plan is at risk.
• Use AI coding agents in development, review, and operations, and help the team use them safely and effectively.
• Follow problems across other teams' services, customer calls, support tickets, and go-to-market data.
• Maintain the health of systems through observability, on-call work, and fixes that prevent recurring incidents.
• Write design notes, pull request descriptions, and status updates for effective collaboration on a remote team.

Benefits

• Remote-first culture with team meetup opportunities and bi-annual destination summits.
• 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.

What This Job Offers

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