Senior Manager, Engineering (Container Product Engineering)

Who we are:

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.

The role in a nutshell: 

Chainguard Containers is our core product, and we're hiring the leader for the team that builds it. As Senior Engineering Manager for Container Product Engineering, you will lead a team of about fifteen engineers who design and ship the features, services, and build systems behind Chainguard Containers. This is a Director-track role reporting directly to the VP of Engineering for Containers, Libraries, and Repositories.

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. Your team builds that foundation: the hardened container images, the registry that serves them, and the tooling that lets engineers and AI agents adopt them.

You will own the team's outcomes end to end: the people, the roadmap partnership with Product, the technical bar, and delivery. The team is senior, with several Staff engineers and a Principal engineer, so this is a job for someone who leads through clarity and judgment rather than process. We also expect you to stay close to the work. 

What the Team Owns:

• 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 (Model Context Protocol, the standard that lets AI agents call tools) so agents can discover and pull our images directly.

What You’ll Do:

• Team Leadership: Lead and manage the Container Product Engineering team, setting clear goals, managing performance, and running a healthy operating cadence. Organize the team into small sub-teams of two to four engineers, each with one project and clear ownership.
• Grow Engineers: Coach a senior-heavy team, including Staff and Principal engineers. Give direct feedback, build career paths, handle underperformance early and humanely, and make this a team people want to join. Partner with Recruiting to hire, leading interviews and calibrating the bar.
• Product Partnership: Work with the Containers Product Managers and Technical Program Manager to turn product requirements into outcomes and projects. Insist on requirements and design docs before a cycle starts, and protect the team from mid-cycle churn.
• Technical Direction and Quality: Hold the technical bar. Review designs and pull requests, and make or assign the final call on contested technical decisions while keeping dissenting engineers heard and committed.
• Hands-On Contribution: Read the code, review pull requests, and ship occasionally. Know the systems well enough to ask the hard questions and to spot drift early.
• AI-Native Operating Model: Lead the team's adoption of agentic coding tools across design, implementation, review, and operations, with review quality and safety guardrails that hold up as volume grows.
• Forecasting and Planning: Plan work and headcount, commit to dates, and report status accurately upward and outward, escalating early when a plan is at risk.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with the Guarded OS, Customer Platform, and Developer Platform engineering teams, with Sales, Customer Success, and Support, and occasionally directly with customers.
• Growing Scope: As the product and team grow, take on broader scope across the Containers organization. This role is on the Director track.

What We’re Looking For:

• 10+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years managing engineering teams that build customer-facing products.
• Experience leading senior engineers, including Staff and Principal level, on a team of ten or more. You know how to give a Principal engineer room and still hold them accountable.
• Real product engineering depth. You have shipped features to paying customers at a company in hyper-growth, and you can turn ambiguous product goals into concrete technical plans.
• A strategic thinker who can scale with a product in hyper-growth. You anticipate what breaks next, plan capacity and headcount ahead of need, and align technical work with business objectives.
• Hands-on and organized. Action-biased. You find a way. You still read code and review pull requests, and you run a tight operating cadence without process for its own sake.
• Low ego. You do what you say and say what you do. You communicate clearly and early, upward and outward, especially when the news is bad.
• You grow engineers and build teams people want to join. A track record of hiring, coaching, promoting, and retaining strong engineers, and of handling underperformance directly.
• AI-native in how you build and lead. You use agentic coding tools daily, and you have led a team to change how it works because of them.
• Technical fluency with containers, container registries and the OCI image format (Open Container Initiative, the standard for container images and registries), Kubernetes, services written in Go, and cloud infrastructure on GCP or AWS. Linux distribution or packaging experience is a plus.
• Experience leading a distributed, remote-first team across North America and Europe, with excellent written communication.
• Location: Remote. North America or the United Kingdom preferred.

Explore Our Work:

Dive into the practical side of what we do at Chainguard. These resources provide a hands-on look at our processes and offer an opportunity for in-depth understanding of our product offerings and the technology behind them.

• Chainguard Academy