Principal Software Engineer – Containers

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States, +3 more countries.

📋 Description

• Define the technical vision for Chainguard Containers, encompassing the build pipeline, registry, and the architecture for adoption tooling for the upcoming one to three years.

• Collaborate with engineering and product leaders to create a roadmap and implement sequenced, resourced technical plans.

• Take ownership of the delivery for the largest multi-team projects from initial concept through to production and adoption.

• Make and document product-level trade-offs, including decisions regarding build versus buy and re-platforming.

• Establish design standards, review significant designs and code, and mentor Staff and Senior engineers to develop them into technical leaders.

• Leverage AI coding agents for system building, reviewing, and operation, while establishing safe team practices.

• Investigate issues across services, customer escalations, support tickets, and go-to-market data.

• Represent Chainguard within the container and open-source community through upstream contributions, standards discussions, presentations, and customer interactions.

• Ensure system health through observability, on-call duties, and implementing structural incident-prevention measures.

• Lead the development of secure container images, registries, image build pipelines, distribution systems, and adoption tooling.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of experience in building and operating software utilized by paying customers, including several years as the technical lead on large, multi-team projects within a startup or hyper-growth environment.

• Relevant expertise in container images, container registries, OCI image format, Linux distributions or package management, build systems, or software supply chain security.

• Demonstrable contributions outside your employer, such as maintaining open-source projects, contributing to standards, delivering talks, or writing recognized by engineers or within industry-standard systems.

• Proven ability to exhibit technical leadership without formal authority.

• Experience in developing and executing roadmaps in collaboration with engineering and product leaders.

• Sound product-level judgment regarding trade-offs.

• Systems-thinking capabilities encompassing source, build, signing, distribution, and runtime processes.

• High levels of agency and urgency.

• Daily utilization of agentic coding tools and experience in transforming team workflows through these tools.

• Architectural proficiency in Go, including the ability to design a Go service from the ground up.

• Strong skills in API design, database management, caching, and cloud infrastructure on GCP or AWS.

• Exceptional written English skills.

• Experience leading in a distributed, remote-first team environment.

• Preferred qualifications include knowledge of software supply chain security, SBOMs, Sigstore, SLSA, open-source maintenance/contributions, product adoption, Terraform or infrastructure-as-code experience, or a non-traditional engineering background.

🏝️ Benefits

• Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Enjoy remote work with opportunities for team meetups, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking spaces, as well as phone and internet expenses.

• Receive stock options upon hiring and promotion.

• Engage in secondary offerings with a 10-year window to exercise your options.

• Comprehensive health, vision, and dental insurance premiums fully covered for you and your dependents.

• Flexible time off policy.

• 18 weeks of paid parental leave for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents, with the flexibility to take it all at once or throughout the child's first year.