Staff Software Engineer, Containers
Build and architect new features for Chainguard Images, a hardened container platform, using Go, Kubernetes, and container toolchains to deliver secure, production-ready software.
- Compensation
- $205K–$231K / yr
- Location
- Canada - Remote; Germany - Remote; United Kingdom - Remote; United States - Remote
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 5+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 5+ years building and operating software that paying customers use, including leading at least one multi-engineer project end to end, preferably at a startup or a company in hyper-growth.
- High agency and urgency. You find a way, you do not wait to be unblocked, and you unblock others.
- Judgment on trade-offs at the system level. You have made calls that moved a roadmap, and you can show what you gave up and why.
- A systems thinker who designs for the whole path: build pipeline, registry, 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.
- Comfortable with ambiguity. You can turn a half-defined product goal into a concrete technical plan, and pivot when priorities shift.
- Architectural depth in Go: you can design a Go service from scratch, not only contribute to one, plus strong API design, databases and caching, and cloud infrastructure on GCP or AWS.
- Deep knowledge of containers, container registries, the OCI image format (Open Container Initiative, the standard for container images and registries), and Kubernetes.
- A track record of mentoring engineers and raising technical practices across a team.
- Low ego. You do what you say and say what you do, and you communicate early when the news is bad.
- Excellent written English and experience working on a distributed, remote-first team.
Nice to have
- 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).
- Familiarity with Chainguard's open-source tools: Wolfi, apko, and melange.
- Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code experience.
- Author of or maintainer of open-source projects.
- A non-traditional path into engineering. We value people who learned by building.
Full description
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.
Who we are
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.
The role, in a nutshell
Chainguard Containers is our core product, and this team builds it. As a Staff Software Engineer in Container Product Engineering you will design and ship the features, services, and build systems behind Chainguard Containers, and you will lead the small sub-teams of two to four engineers that own them.
Chainguard is growing explosively. Every line of code is now written with AI in the loop, which means the foundation it runs on has to be secure by default. You will build that foundation: the hardened container images, the registry that serves them, and the tooling that lets engineers and AI agents adopt them.
This is a product role with technical ownership. You will set direction for major new capabilities, make the architectural calls that affect the team and the teams next to it, and multiply the output of the engineers around you. You will stay hands-on: most of your week is still building.
What the team owns
- Product features for Chainguard Containers. Letting customers push their own images to our registry, Custom Assembly (customers compose images from our hardened packages), Helm charts, notifications, and compliance views such as STIG dashboards (STIG is the US government's hardening standard).
- The image build pipeline. The systems that turn packages from Wolfi, our Linux distribution, into signed and attested container images at scale, including moving image builds onto our own runner infrastructure.