Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Chainguard is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to design and ship features, services, and build systems for Chainguard Containers. The role provides technical ownership of major capabilities, leads small engineering sub-teams, and remains hands-on building secure container images, registry services, and adoption tools.
Responsibilities
- Architect and drive the delivery of major new features and services for Chainguard Containers, often spanning several engineers or teams, from concept through production and the first weeks of customer use
- Make and own the high-leverage trade-offs: which capability to build first, what to defer, when to re-platform and when not to. Write the decision down and bring dissenting engineers along
- Work with AI coding agents as part of how you build, review, and operate, and set the standard for how the team uses them safely as volume grows
- Follow a problem wherever it goes: into another team's service, a customer call, a support ticket, or go-to-market data, and work across team boundaries to get ahead of planning cycles
- Mentor and level up other engineers through design review and pair work, and set the standard for how the team designs, builds, and ships
- Partner with Product and engineering leadership on roadmap, bringing a technical point of view to what we build, not only how
- Keep the systems you own healthy: observability, on-call, and the fixes that stop the same page from coming back
- Write clearly and often. Design notes, decision records, and status updates are how a remote team moves fast together
Skills
- 5+ years building and operating software that paying customers use, including leading at least one multi-engineer project end to end
- 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
- We are unable to provide visa sponsorship for this role
- Preferably at a startup or a company in hyper-growth
- 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
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.
- You can participate in secondary offerings and have 10 years to exercise your options.
- 100% coverage of 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