Principal Software Engineer (Containers)

Location: Remote in the United States; open to Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Visa sponsorship and relocation are not available.

Base salary: $229,000–$258,000 USD annually.

Company

hirify.global builds hardened, secure, and production-ready open-source software and container images for organizations, including Fortune 500 enterprises.

What you will do

• Set the technical direction and architecture for hirify.global Containers, including build pipelines, registries, and adoption tooling.
• Form roadmaps with engineering and product leaders and lead the largest multi-team projects from concept through production and adoption.
• Make product-level trade-offs, document architectural decisions, and guide engineers without formal management authority.
• Build and improve hardened container images, image distribution, signing, attestation, registry performance, and lazy loading.
• Develop migration tools, MCP servers, and other tooling for engineers and AI agents.
• Maintain system health through observability, on-call participation, incident prevention, open-source work, and customer engagement.

Requirements

• 10+ years building and operating software used by paying customers, including several years leading large multi-team projects.
• Relevant experience with container images, registries, OCI, Linux distributions, package management, build systems, or software supply chain security.
• Architectural depth in Go, plus strong API design, databases, caching, and AWS or GCP infrastructure experience.
• Experience setting technical direction without direct authority, forming roadmaps, and making product-level trade-offs.
• Daily use of AI coding tools and experience changing team practices through agentic development.
• Excellent written English and experience leading on a distributed, remote-first team.

Nice to have

• Experience with SBOMs, Sigstore, SLSA, Terraform, or infrastructure as code.
• Maintainer or significant contributor to Wolfi, apko, melange, containerd, Kubernetes, or OCI projects.
• Experience taking a product from early customers to broad adoption.
• A non-traditional path into engineering.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote-first culture with team meetups, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly coworking, phone, and internet stipend.
• Stock options upon hire and promotion, with participation in secondary offerings and a 10-year exercise period.
• Company-paid health, vision, and dental insurance for employees and dependents.
• Flexible time off and paid parental leave.
• Customer-focused, transparent, collaborative culture with an emphasis on intentional action and low-ego communication.