Manager, Engineering (Guarded Containers)

The role in a nutshell: The Containers engineering team is responsible for our core product – our minimal, hardened, industry-defining Chainguard Images, and we’re looking for an engineering manager to lead the Tools team within the Containers organization. You will lead and support the team responsible for the infrastructure and tooling that builds Chainguard Images. You’ll manage multiple projects in parallel, ensure technical excellence and customer success, and collaborate with other engineering teams who depend on you. This role is pivotal in ensuring our product is delivered to customers, with high quality, and is able to scale as the company grows rapidly.

What You’ll Do:

• Lead, manage and grow a diverse engineering team within the Containers organization, overseeing our core image build tooling and infrastructure
• Manage multiple concurrent projects and workstreams, removing blockers and enabling efficient team operations.
• Set quality standards and drive continuous improvements to test infrastructure, build systems, and processes
• Oversee day-to-day operations including escalations, alerts, cross-team dependency management, and project tracking.
• Respond to and prioritize customer escalations and internal queries related to container services.
• Track success metrics including build success rates, escalation volumes, and team performance indicators

What We’re Looking For:

• Proven success managing engineering teams—ideally in container technologies, cloud infrastructure, or product-centric environments—with a genuine, sustained passion for team leadership. Not just comfortable managing people, but deeply motivated by the challenges and rewards of leading technical teams. You find real energy in mentoring, coaching, and unlocking potential in others, and you view team success as the ultimate measure of your own impact.
• Experience building and scaling distributed systems, tooling, and automation for container images.
• Superb organizational skills and project management capabilities.
• Demonstrated ability to drive technical vision, operational rigor, and cross-team collaboration.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills
• Experience working with multiple time zones and remote/distributed teams is a strong plus

About Us

Chainguard is the secure foundation for software development and deployment. By providing guarded open source software, built from source and updated continuously, Chainguard helps organizations eliminate threats in their software supply chains.

Founded by the industry's leading experts on open source software, security and cloud native development, Chainguard has built the largest library of open source software that is secure by default.

Chainguard’s mission is to be the safe source for open source.

We live and breathe our company values:

We are customer obsessed - We focus on delivering solutions to our customers that create value and make their lives better.

We have a bias for intentional action - We prioritize, plan, try things, and fail fast.

We don’t take ourselves too seriously (but we do serious work) - We are solving an important problem which takes focus, but we also like to enjoy the journey.

We trust each other and assume good intentions - We’re transparent with decisions to empower team members to make well informed decisions.

A few of the benefits we offer:

• Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Work remotely with team meetup opportunities, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone and internet costs.
• Our Approach to Equity: Receive stock options upon hire and promotion. Plus, you can participate in secondary offerings and have 10 years to exercise your options (yes, you read that correctly: 10 years!).
• 100% Covered Health Insurance: We cover 100% of your health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents. Nothing comes out of your paycheck.
• ∞ Flexible Time Off: Take the time you need – to do our best work, we need to recharge and reset.
• 18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave: We offer 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents, with the option to use it all at once or throughout your child's first year.
• For a full list of our benefits and rewards, click here.

If your experience is close but doesn’t fulfill all requirements, please apply. We’re building the best team in technology and are focused on hiring “Chainguardians'' with unique backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences.

Chainguard is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, reproductive health decisions, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, political views or activity, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law.

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