Principal Software Engineer, Containers

A fast-growing, remote-first software supply chain security company is looking for a Principal Software Engineer to set the technical direction for its core container product. You will be the most senior individual contributor on a team of about fifteen engineers, leading the largest projects from idea to customer while staying hands-on. This role is remote, with the United States preferred. Visa sponsorship and relocation are not available.

Role

• Set the technical direction for the container product: the architecture of the build pipeline, the registry and the adoption tooling over the next one to three years

• Form the roadmap with engineering and product leaders, then execute it across teams from concept through production and adoption

• Own the product-level trade-offs, such as build versus buy and when to re-platform, and bring dissenting engineers along

• Lead through other engineers: set the design bar and review the designs and code that matter most

• Work with AI coding agents as part of how you build, review and operate, and set the standard for safe use across the team

• Represent the company in the container and open source ecosystem through upstream work, standards and talks

• The team owns hardened container images, the registry that serves them, the build pipeline that turns packages into signed images, registry performance such as lazy loading and Sigstore signing, and adoption tooling including Dockerfile migration and MCP servers for AI agents

Requirements

• 10+ years building and operating software used by paying customers, including several years as technical lead of large multi-team projects at a startup or hyper-growth company

• Relevant experience with container images, registries and the OCI image format, Linux distributions or package management, build systems, or software supply chain security

• Visible work in the field: open source you maintain, standards you helped shape, talks or systems the industry knows

• Technical leadership without authority, and experience forming roadmaps with engineering and product leaders

• Systems thinking across upstream source, build, signing, distribution and the customer runtime

• Architectural depth in Go, API design, databases and caching, and cloud infrastructure on GCP or AWS

• AI-native: you use agentic coding tools daily and have changed how a team works because of them

• Excellent written English and experience leading on a distributed, remote-first team

• Nice to have: SBOMs, Sigstore and SLSA; contributions to Wolfi, apko, melange, containerd, Kubernetes or OCI specifications; Terraform

Benefits

• Salary range: $229,000-$258,000 USD

• Remote-first culture with a monthly stipend for coworking, phone and internet

• Stock options on hire and promotion, with 10 years to exercise

• 100% covered health, vision and dental premiums for you and your dependents

• Flexible time off

• 18 weeks paid parental leave for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents

Skills

Go, golang, containers, OCI, container registry, Linux, package management, build systems, software supply chain security, SBOM, Sigstore, SLSA, Kubernetes, containerd, API design, GCP, AWS, Terraform, AI agents, technical leadership, distributed systems