Staff Software Engineer, Containers

Chainguard

1d • $205,000 - $231,000 • Remote

About The Position

Chainguard is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for Container Product Engineering, the team responsible for Chainguard Containers. The role designs and ships product features, services, and build systems behind hardened, secure, production-ready container images. It carries technical ownership: setting direction for major capabilities, making architectural decisions that affect the team and adjacent teams, and leading small sub-teams of two to four engineers while remaining hands-on in most of the work week.

The team builds customer-facing Chainguard Containers features, including customer image publishing, Custom Assembly, Helm charts, notifications, and compliance views such as STIG dashboards. It owns the image build pipeline that turns Wolfi packages into signed and attested container images at scale, registry performance and distribution, and adoption tools such as Dockerfile migration utilities and MCP servers for AI agents.

The engineer will drive major capabilities from concept through production and early customer use; make and document product and system trade-offs; use AI coding agents and establish safe practices for their use; work across teams and with customers; mentor engineers and raise team practices; partner with Product and engineering leadership on the roadmap; maintain owned systems through observability, on-call, and corrective fixes; and communicate clearly in a distributed, remote-first environment.

The position is remote. The United States is preferred, and applications are also accepted from Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Chainguard cannot provide visa sponsorship or relocation. The stated base salary range is $205,000–$231,000 USD.

Requirements

• At least 5 years building and operating software used by paying customers.
• Experience leading at least one multi-engineer project end to end.
• High agency and urgency; able to make progress independently and unblock others.
• System-level trade-off judgment, including decisions that influenced a roadmap and a clear explanation of the alternatives and rationale.
• Systems-thinking approach spanning build pipelines, registries, distribution, and customer runtime, with awareness of second-order effects.
• Daily use of agentic coding tools and experience changing how a team works through their use.
• Ability to turn an ambiguous product goal into a concrete technical plan and adapt when priorities change.
• Architectural depth in Go, including the ability to design a Go service from scratch.
• Strong API design, database and caching, and cloud infrastructure experience on GCP or AWS.
• Deep knowledge of containers, container registries, the OCI image format, and Kubernetes.
• Track record of mentoring engineers and raising technical practices across a team.
• Low-ego approach, reliable follow-through, and early communication when problems arise.
• Excellent written English and experience working on a distributed, remote-first team.

Nice To Haves

• Software supply chain security experience, such as SBOMs, Sigstore signing, or SLSA.
• Familiarity with Chainguard open-source tools: Wolfi, apko, and melange.
• Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code experience.
• Authorship or maintenance of open-source projects.
• A non-traditional path into engineering; the company values people who learned by building.

Responsibilities

• Architect and drive delivery of major Chainguard Containers features and services, from concept through production and the first weeks of customer use.
• Lead small sub-teams of two to four engineers and coordinate work spanning multiple engineers or teams.
• Make, own, and document high-impact product and system trade-offs, including priorities and re-platforming decisions; bring dissenting engineers along.
• Use AI coding agents in building, reviewing, and operating software, and establish safe team practices for using them.
• Work across team boundaries and follow problems into other services, customer conversations, support tickets, and go-to-market data.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews and pair work, and raise standards for team design, development, and delivery.
• Partner with Product and engineering leadership on the roadmap and contribute technical judgment about what to build.
• Maintain the health of owned systems through observability, on-call work, and fixes that prevent recurring incidents.
• Write design notes, decision records, and status updates to support effective work across 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; 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: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed