Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Chainguard is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to build and ship features, services, and build systems for Chainguard Containers. The role owns projects end to end, including container image pipelines, registry performance, and adoption tooling, while working with product managers and customers.
Responsibilities
- 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
Skills
- 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
- 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
Benefits
- Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Work remotely with team meetup opportunities, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone and internet costs.
- Stock options upon hire and promotion; participation in secondary offerings; 10 years to exercise options.
- 100% covered health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents.
- Flexible time off.
- 18 weeks paid parental leave for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents, with the option to use it all at once or throughout your child's first year.
Company Overview