Principal Software Engineer, Containers

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 Principal Software Engineer in Container Product Engineering you will be the most senior individual contributor on a team of about fifteen engineers, setting the technical direction for the product and leading its largest, most consequential projects from idea to customer. 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 shape 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 technical leadership role, not a management role. You will work directly with engineering and product leaders to form the roadmap, then lead engineers across sub-teams to execute it. You will stay hands-on: you write and review code every week, and the hardest problems land on your desk first. 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 • 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 hi