Senior Manager, Engineering (Container Product Engineering)

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 we're hiring the leader for the team that builds it. As Senior Engineering Manager for Container Product Engineering, you will lead a team of about fifteen engineers who design and ship the features, services, and build systems behind Chainguard Containers. This is a Director-track role reporting directly to the VP of Engineering for Containers, Libraries, and Repositories. 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. Your team builds that foundation: the hardened container images, the registry that serves them, and the tooling that lets engineers and AI agents adopt them. You will own the team's outcomes end to end: the people, the roadmap partnership with Product, the technical bar, and delivery. The team is senior, with several Staff engineers and a Principal engineer, so this is a job for someone who leads through clarity and judgment rather than process. We also expect you to stay close to the work. 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. • Registry performance and distribution: Work such as lazy loading, so a container starts before its whole image has downloaded, and image signing with Sigstore. • Adoption tooling for engineers and AI agents: Migration tools that convert existing Dockerfiles to Chainguard Containers, and MCP servers (Model Context Protocol, the standard that lets AI agents call tools) so agents can discover and pull our images directly. What You’ll Do: • Team Leadership: Lead and manage the Container Product Engineering team, setting clear goals, managing performance, and running a healthy operating cadence. Organize the team into small sub-teams of two to four engineers, each with one project and clear ownership. • Grow Engineers: Coach a senior-heavy team, including Staff and Principal engineers. Give direct feedback, build career paths, handle underperformance early and humanely, and make this a team people