Principal Software Engineer, Containers

Remote: yes Posted: 2026-10-16

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.

Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and global industry leaders, including Anduril, Canva, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpenAI, Snap Inc., and Snowflake.

Chainguard is venture-backed by leading investors, including Amplify, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mantis VC, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital.

Remote. United States preferred; Open to Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany. We are unable to provide visa sponsorship or relocation for this role.

- Set the technical direction for Chainguard Containers: the architecture of the build pipeline, the registry, and the adoption tooling over the next one to three years, written down and defended in the open.

- Form the roadmap with engineering and product leaders, then execute it. Turn ambiguous business goals into sequenced, staffed technical plans, and own the delivery of the largest multi-team projects from concept through production and adoption.

- Make and own the trade-offs that shape the product: build versus buy, when to re-platform and when not to, what to cut to hit a date. Write the decision down and bring dissenting engineers along.

- Lead through other engineers. Set the design bar, review the designs and code that matter most, and grow the Staff and Senior engineers around you into the next generation of technical leaders.

- Work with AI coding agents as part of how you build, review, and operate, and set the standard for how the whole team uses them safely as volume grows.

- Follow a problem wherever it goes: another team's service, a customer escalation, a support ticket, or go-to-market data, and work across team and company boundaries to get ahead of planning cycles.

- Represent Chainguard in the container and open source ecosystem: upstream work, standards conversations, talks, and the customer conversations where credibility is the product.

- Keep the systems you own healthy: observability, on-call, and the structural fixes that stop whole classes of incidents.