Principal Software Engineer, Containers

Job description

**This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, which manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Principal Software Engineer, Containers based in the United States.** As a Principal Software Engineer, you will define the technical direction of a core container technology platform that helps organizations build, deploy, and operate software securely at scale. You will lead the design and delivery of critical systems spanning hardened container images, image build pipelines, registry infrastructure, and developer adoption tools. This is a senior individual contributor role where your technical expertise and architectural judgment will influence product strategy and engineering execution. Working closely with engineering and product leaders, you will turn complex business objectives into long-term roadmaps and high-impact, multi-team initiatives. You will remain hands-on with architecture, coding, and code reviews while mentoring experienced engineers and advancing the safe use of AI-powered development tools. This remote opportunity is ideal for a technically influential leader passionate about open-source software, cloud infrastructure, and software supply chain security. ### Accountabilities: - Technical Strategy and Architecture: Define and communicate the technical vision for container products, including build pipelines, registry architecture, distribution systems, and developer adoption tooling over a one-to-three-year horizon. - Roadmap Development and Execution: Partner with engineering and product leadership to establish priorities, translate ambiguous business goals into actionable technical plans, and lead major initiatives from concept through production and customer adoption. - Architectural Decision-Making: Own critical technical and product trade-offs, including build-versus-buy decisions, platform modernization, prioritization, and delivery timelines. Document decisions transparently and build alignment across engineering teams. - Container Product Engineering: Guide the development of customer-facing capabilities such as custom container image publishing, image composition from hardened packages, Helm charts, notifications, and compliance dashboards. - Build Pipeline and Infrastructure: Advance systems that transform Linux distribution packages into signed and attested container images at scale, including improvements to build infrastructure and execution environments. - Registry Performance and Distribution: Drive improvements to container image delivery, including lazy loading and image signing technologies, to improve performance, reliability, and security. - Developer and AI Agent Tooling: Lead the development of migration tools that help customers adopt secure container images, along with Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations that enable AI agents to discover and retrieve container images. - Technical Leadership and Mentorship: Establish high engineering standards through design reviews, code reviews, and architectural guidance. Mentor Senior and Staff Engineers, helping them develop into stronger technical leaders without relying on formal management authority. - AI-Assisted Engineering: Integrate AI coding agents into development, code review, and operational workflows while establishing practices that support secure and responsible adoption across the engineering team. - Cross-Functional Problem Solving: Work across organizational boundaries to resolve complex technical challenges, address customer escalations, investigate support issues, and incorporate customer and go-to-market insights into product planning. - Open-Source Community Engagement: Represent the organization in the container and open-source ecosystem through upstream contributions, standards discussions, technical presentations, and customer engagements. - Reliability and Operational Excellence: Maintain the health of owned systems through observability, on-call participation, incident response, and structural improvements that prevent recurring operational issues. ### Requirements: - Professional Experience: At least 10 years of experience building and operating software used by paying customers, including several years leading large, multi-team technical initiatives in a startup or high-growth environment. - Container and Infrastructure Expertise: Significant experience in one or more closely related areas, such as container images, container registries, the Open Container Initiative (OCI) image format, Linux distributions, package management, build systems, or software supply chain security. - Technical Leadership: A demonstrated record of setting technical direction and delivering results through influence rather than formal management authority, including leading engineers across multiple teams. - Strategic Planning: Experience developing and executing technical roadmaps with engineering and product leaders, managing competing priorities, making difficult trade-offs, and maintaining delivery commitments. - Architectural Judgment: Strong systems-thinking skills and the ability to design across the full software supply chain, from upstream source code and build processes to signing, distribution, and customer runtime environments. - Go Development: Deep architectural proficiency in Go, including the ability to design and build services from the ground up. - Cloud and Backend Engineering: Strong knowledge of API design, databases, caching, and cloud infrastructure, particularly Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Amazon Web Services (AWS). - AI-Enabled Development: Regular use of AI-powered and agentic coding tools, with demonstrated experience improving how engineering teams build, review, or operate software through these technologies. - Communication and Collaboration: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, strong technical documentation practices, and experience leading effectively within distributed, remote-first teams. - Ownership and Initiative: A proactive, high-agency approach to solving problems, unblocking others, communicating risks early, and following through on commitments with humility and accountability. - Industry Recognition: Evidence of technical contributions beyond a current employer, such as maintaining open-source projects, shaping standards, publishing technical content, speaking at industry events, or building widely recognized systems. - Preferred Security Expertise: Experience with software bills of materials (SBOMs), Sigstore signing, or SLSA frameworks for software build integrity. - Preferred Open-Source Contributions: Experience maintaining or contributing significantly to projects such as Wolfi, apko, melange, containerd, Kubernetes, or OCI specifications. - Additional Preferred Skills: Experience scaling a product from early customers to broad adoption, familiarity with Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code tools, or a non-traditional path into software engineering. - Work Location and Authorization: The role is remote, with candidates in the United States preferred. Applicants in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany may also be considered. Employment visa sponsorship and relocation assistance are not available. ### Benefits: - Competitive Base Salary: Annual base salary range of $229,000–$258,000 USD. - Equity Compensation: Stock options upon hiring and promotion, with opportunities to participate in secondary offerings and a 10-year exercise window for options. - Comprehensive Health Coverage: 100% of health, vision, and dental insurance premiums covered for employees and their dependents. - Flexible Paid Time Off: Flexible time off designed to support rest, personal commitments, and sustainable performance. - Paid Parental Leave: 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents, with the option to use leave consecutively or throughout the child's first year. - Remote-First Flexibility: Work remotely with opportunities for team meetups and twice-yearly destination summits. - Remote Work Stipend: Monthly support for coworking spaces, phone, and internet expenses. - Professional Growth: Opportunities to shape technical strategy, contribute to influential open-source projects, mentor experienced engineers, and work on complex security and infrastructure challenges. - Inclusive Culture: A commitment to welcoming people with diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and career paths. - Meaningful Technical Impact: The opportunity to influence the security, reliability, and adoption of foundational container technology used by engineering teams and AI agents.