Chainguard provides trusted open source artifacts for every layer of your modern software stack—containers, language libraries, and VM images. Backed by General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed.
About the role
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. Found on 1752vc Careers, the job board for startup and VC roles.
What they're looking for
- 10+ years building and operating software that paying customers use, including several years as the technical lead of large, multi-team projects at a startup or a company in hyper-growth
- Known in the field. Your work is visible outside your employer: open source you maintain, standards you helped shape, talks or writing that other engineers cite, or systems the industry knows you built
- A track record of technical leadership without authority: you have set direction for a team you did not manage, and the team delivered
- Experience forming and executing roadmaps with engineering and product leaders, including saying no, re-sequencing, and holding a date
- Judgment on trade-offs at the product level. You have made calls that moved a company's roadmap, and you can show what you gave up and why
- A systems thinker who designs for the whole path, from upstream source through build, signing, distribution, and the customer's runtime, and who sees second-order effects before they land
More about this role
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.
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...
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