Principal Software Engineer (Containers)

Join Chainguard, a rapidly growing company focused on container security. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will lead the technical direction for Chainguard Containers, our core product. You will work closely with engineering and product leaders to form the roadmap and execute it, while also staying hands-on with coding and problem-solving. This is a technical leadership role, not a management role, and you will have the opportunity to shape the future of container security.

Set the technical direction for Chainguard Containers, leading the architecture of the build pipeline, the registry, and the adoption tooling over the next one to three years.

Known in the field. Your work is visible outside your employer: open source you maintain, standards you helped shape, talks or writing that other engineers cite, or systems the industry knows you built

About Chainguard

• A systems thinker who designs for the whole path, from upstream source through build, signing, distribution, and the customer's runtime, and who sees second-order effects before they land
• AI-native in how you build and lead. You use agentic coding tools daily and you have changed how a team works because of them
• A non-traditional path into engineering. We value people who learned by building

Responsibilities

• Form the roadmap with engineering and product leaders, then execute it, turning ambiguous business goals into sequenced, staffed technical plans.
• Lead through other engineers, setting the design bar, reviewing the designs and code that matter most, and growing the Staff and Senior engineers around you into the next generation of technical leaders.
• Architectural depth in Go: you can design a Go service from scratch, plus strong API design, databases and caching, and cloud infrastructure on GCP or AWS
• Judgment on trade-offs at the product level. You have made calls that moved a company's roadmap, and you can show what you gave up and why

Requirements

• Closely relevant experience in what we do: container images, container registries and the OCI image format (Open Container Initiative, the standard for container images and registries), Linux distributions or package management, build systems, or software supply chain security
• A track record of technical leadership without authority: you have set direction for a team you did not manage, and the team delivered
• Low ego. You do what you say and say what you do, and you communicate early when the news is bad
• High agency and urgency. You find a way, you do not wait to be unblocked, and you unblock others
• 10+ years building and operating software that paying customers use, including several years as the technical lead of large, multi-team projects at a startup or a company in hyper-growth
• Experience forming and executing roadmaps with engineering and product leaders, including saying no, re-sequencing, and holding a date
• Excellent written English and experience leading on a distributed, remote-first team
• Maintainer of, or significant contributor to, Chainguard's open-source tools (Wolfi, apko, melange) or neighboring projects such as containerd, Kubernetes, or OCI specifications
• Deep software supply chain security background: SBOMs (software bill of materials), Sigstore signing, or SLSA (Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts, a framework for build integrity)
• Experience taking a product from early customers to broad adoption

Pay

USD 229,000 - 258,000

Benefits

• Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code experience