Senior Manager, Engineering (Container Product Engineering)

Chainguard delivers hardened, secure, and production-ready builds of open source software. The Senior Manager, Engineering for Container Product Engineering will lead a team of approximately fifteen engineers responsible for Chainguard Containers, including product features, image build systems, registry performance, distribution, and adoption tooling. The role owns team outcomes, people leadership, product partnership, technical quality, planning, and delivery while operating on a Director track.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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
• 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
• Linux distribution or packaging experience is a plus