Senior Software Engineer, Containers

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 Senior Software Engineer in Container Product Engineering you will design and ship the features, services, and build systems behind Chainguard Containers, working in a small sub-team of two to four engineers that owns one project end to end.

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. You will work directly with Product Managers and customers, make the trade-off calls on the features you own, and ship them.

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

• Design, build, and ship new features and services for Chainguard Containers, from a one-page design through production and the first week of customer use.
• Own the trade-offs on your work: scope, sequencing, what to cut, and when "good enough to ship" beats "complete". Say so clearly when a plan is at risk.
• Work with AI coding agents as part of how you build, review, and operate, and help the team raise the bar on how it uses them safely.
• Follow a problem wherever it goes: into another team's service, a customer call, a support ticket, or go-to-market data, rather than stopping at the edge of your own repository.
• Keep the systems you touch healthy: observability, on-call, and the fixes that stop the same page from coming back.
• Write clearly and often. Design notes, pull request descriptions, and status updates are how a remote team moves fast together.

What we're looking for

• 3+ years building and operating software that paying customers use, 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 ask for help early when you are stuck.
• Judgment on trade-offs. You can explain why you chose speed here and rigor there, and you can change your mind when the data says to.
• A systems thinker. You reason about how a change moves through the build pipeline, the registry, and the customer's cluster, and you anticipate what breaks next.
• AI-native in how you work. You use agentic coding tools daily and can show what changed in your output because of them.
• Comfortable with ambiguity. You can pick up a half-defined problem, decide what to build, and pivot when priorities shift.
• Strong fundamentals in a systems language (Go preferred), API design, databases and caching, and cloud infrastructure on GCP or AWS.
• Working knowledge of containers, container registries, the OCI image format (Open Container Initiative, the standard for container images and registries), and Kubernetes.
• 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 haves

• 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 contributor to open-source projects.
• A non-traditional path into engineering. We value people who learned by building.

Location

Remote. United States preferred; Open to Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany. We are unable to provide visa sponsorship or relocation for this role.

Explore Our Work

Dive into the practical side of what we do at Chainguard. These resources provide a hands-on look at our processes and offer an opportunity for in-depth understanding of our product offerings and the technology behind them.

• Chainguard Academy
• https://www.chainguard.dev