Software Engineer, Containers

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 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 a Staff Software Engineer in Container Product Engineering you will design and ship the features, services, and build systems behind Chainguard Containers, and you will lead the small sub-teams of two to four engineers that own them. 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 with technical ownership. You will set direction for major new capabilities, make the architectural calls that affect the team and the teams next to it, and multiply the output of the engineers around you.

You will stay hands-on: most of your week is still building.

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