About the role

Principal Software Engineer setting technical direction for Chainguard’s hardened container images, registry, and adoption tooling. Leading multi-team delivery for a company securing open-source software.

Responsibilities

Set the technical direction for Chainguard Containers, including the build pipeline, registry, and adoption tooling architecture over the next one to three years.
Form the roadmap with engineering and product leaders and execute sequenced, staffed technical plans.
Own delivery of the largest multi-team projects from concept through production and adoption.
Make and document product-level trade-offs, including build versus buy and re-platforming decisions.
Set design standards, review key designs and code, and develop Staff and Senior engineers into technical leaders.
Use AI coding agents in building, reviewing, and operating systems, and establish safe team practices.
Investigate issues across services, customer escalations, support tickets, and go-to-market data.
Represent Chainguard in the container and open source ecosystem through upstream work, standards conversations, talks, and customer discussions.
Maintain system health through observability, on-call, and structural incident-prevention fixes.
Build and lead development of hardened container images, registries, image build pipelines, distribution systems, and adoption tooling.

10+ years building and operating software used by paying customers, including several years as the technical lead of large, multi-team projects at a startup or hyper-growth company.
Relevant experience with container images, container registries, OCI image format, Linux distributions or package management, build systems, or software supply chain security.
Visible work outside your employer, such as maintained open source, standards contributions, talks or writing cited by engineers, or industry-known systems.
Track record of technical leadership without authority.
Experience forming and executing roadmaps with engineering and product leaders.
Product-level judgment on trade-offs.
Systems-thinking across source, build, signing, distribution, and runtime.
High agency and urgency.
Daily use of agentic coding tools and experience changing team workflows through them.
Architectural depth in Go, including designing a Go service from scratch.
Strong API design, databases and caching, and cloud infrastructure on GCP or AWS.
Excellent written English.
Experience leading on a distributed, remote-first team.
Nice to have: software supply chain security, SBOMs, Sigstore, SLSA, open-source maintenance/contributions, product adoption, Terraform or infrastructure-as-code experience, or a non-traditional engineering path.

Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Work remotely with team meetup opportunities, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone and internet costs.
Receive stock options upon hire and promotion.
Participate in secondary offerings and have 10 years to exercise your options.
100% covered health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents.
Flexible time off.
18 weeks paid parental leave for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents, with the option to use it all at once or throughout the child's first year.