[Remote] Senior Software Engineer, Containers

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Chainguard builds hardened, secure, production-ready open-source software. The Senior Software Engineer will design and ship features, services, and build systems for Chainguard Containers, working with product managers and customers and owning projects through production.

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
• 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
• We are unable to provide visa sponsorship
• Preferably at a startup or a company in hyper-growth
• (Go preferred)
• 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
• United States preferred

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.
• Receive stock options upon hire and promotion.
• You can participate in secondary offerings and have 10 years to exercise your options.
• 100% covered health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents; nothing comes out of your paycheck.
• 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