Remote opportunity at
ChainguardPrincipal Software Engineer, Containers
Chainguard seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead its container product engineering group. As the primary individual contributor among a fifteen-person squad, this position establishes technical…
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About This Role
Chainguard seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead its container product engineering group. As the primary individual contributor among a fifteen-person squad, this position establishes technical direction and drives large initiatives from concept to customer release. The organization creates hardened open-source builds and secure software foundations used by major global enterprises. This technical leadership path centers on hands-on architecture, code review, and development alongside AI coding agents, rather than personnel…
Job Description
Chainguard seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead its container product engineering group. As the primary individual contributor among a fifteen-person squad, this position establishes technical direction and drives large initiatives from concept to customer release. The organization creates hardened open-source builds and secure software foundations used by major global enterprises. This technical leadership path centers on hands-on architecture, code review, and development alongside AI coding agents, rather than personnel management.
Responsibilities include shaping the product roadmap for registries, image build pipelines, and adoption tooling, while collaborating closely with engineering and product leaders. The individual sets design standards, mentors senior team members, and resolves complex technical bottlenecks across distributed systems. The core technology stack relies heavily on Go, cloud infrastructure on AWS or GCP, and container standards such as OCI.
Ideal candidates bring extensive experience operating production software, a recognized background in the container or open-source community, and expertise in systems architecture. The role requires strong written communication skills for operating within a globally distributed team. Qualified applicants may include those with non-traditional career backgrounds who demonstrate high agency and urgency.
Responsibilities
- Define the one to three-year technical direction and architecture for Chainguard Containers, covering build pipelines, registries, and adoption tooling
- Collaborate with engineering and product leadership to establish roadmaps, transform ambiguous goals into structured plans, and deliver multi-team projects
- Write and review code weekly while addressing the most challenging engineering problems first
- Establish design standards, evaluate critical system designs, and mentor senior and staff engineers
- Utilize agentic coding tools daily and establish safe operational standards for AI usage across the team
- Represent the organization within the container and open source ecosystem through upstream contributions, standards discussions, and technical talks
- Maintain system health through observability practices, on-call participation, and structural fixes to prevent incidents
Requirements
- Over 10 years of experience building and operating software utilized by paying customers
- Demonstrated experience functioning as a technical lead for large, multi-team projects within a startup or hyper-growth environment
- Directly relevant background in container images, registries, OCI formats, Linux distributions, package management, build systems, or supply chain security
- Demonstrated technical leadership without formal authority by guiding unmanaged teams to successful delivery
- Proficiency in architectural design using Go, alongside strong API design, databases, caching, and cloud infrastructure on GCP or AWS
- Demonstrated daily use of agentic coding tools with experience driving team adoption
Qualifications
- Deep background in software supply chain security including SBOMs, Sigstore signing, or SLSA frameworks
- Maintainer or significant contributor status for open-source tools such as Wolfi, apko, melange, containerd, Kubernetes, or OCI specifications
- Prior experience scaling a product from early customers to broad adoption
- Experience with Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code tools
- Non-traditional path into software engineering
- Inclusion of the term DiscoTech on the resume
Core Skills
Benefits
- Flexible and remote-first culture with coworking stipends, team meetups, and bi-annual destination summits
- Stock options upon hire and promotion with secondary offering participation and a 10-year exercise window
- 100 percent coverage of health, vision, and dental insurance premiums for employees and dependents
- Flexible time off policy
- 18 weeks of paid parental leave for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers are based only on the employer’s listing; where it doesn’t say, neither do we.
Is this a remote role?
Yes, this is a remote-first position. United States candidates are preferred, but applicants in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany are also considered.
What is the salary range for this position?
The base salary range is USD 229,000 to 258,000 per year, accompanied by stock options and comprehensive health benefits.
Does this role involve management duties?
No, this is a technical leadership individual contributor role rather than a management position, though it involves guiding senior engineers and setting technical direction.
Does Chainguard provide visa sponsorship or relocation?
No, the company is unable to offer visa sponsorship or relocation assistance for this role.
Sample Interview Questions
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