Principal Software Engineer, Containers

Role overview Set technical direction for a secure container product spanning image builds, a registry, and tools that help engineers adopt hardened software. As a senior individual contributor, you’ll shape the roadmap with product and engineering leaders, lead major projects across teams, and remain hands-on with code, design reviews, and operational problems.

Responsibilities - Define and communicate the multi-year architecture for the build pipeline, registry, and adoption tools. - Turn business goals into sequenced technical plans and lead significant projects from concept through production and customer adoption. - Make and document product-level trade-offs, such as build versus buy, re-platforming, and delivery scope. - Guide technical design and code reviews, while helping senior engineers develop into technical leaders. - Use AI coding agents in development and operations, and establish safe, effective practices for team use. - Work across team boundaries to resolve customer issues, improve observability and on-call health, and contribute to container and open-source communities.

Requirements - At least ten years building and operating software used by paying customers, including several years leading large, multi-team efforts in a startup or high-growth environment. - Relevant expertise in areas such as container images or registries, OCI, Linux distributions, package management, build systems, or software supply-chain security. - Publicly visible technical contributions, such as maintained open-source projects, standards work, talks, writing, or widely used systems. - Experience setting direction across teams without direct management authority. - Strong roadmap judgment, including prioritization, sequencing, and making trade-offs while working with product and engineering leaders. - Systems thinking across source code, builds, signing, distribution, and customer runtime, plus a record of taking ownership of difficult problems.

Nice to have - Contributions to related open-source projects, experience taking a product from early customers to broad adoption, or infrastructure-as-code experience. - A non-traditional path into software engineering.

Benefits and work setup Remote; applicants in the United States are preferred, with Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany also considered. Relocation and visa sponsorship are unavailable. Listed benefits include stock options, flexible time off, fully covered health, vision, and dental premiums for employees and dependents, paid parental leave, and stipends for coworking, phone, and internet costs.