The Role, In a Nutshell
We are looking for an Engineering VP to lead a new product engineering organization focused on rapidly bringing new products to market. Reporting to the SVP of Engineering, this executive leader will build, scale, and drive teams that take Chainguard into new product areas — moving from zero to one and one to many with speed, quality, and conviction. This is a builder's role: you'll stand up new teams, define how they operate, ship products on aggressive timelines, and scale what works.
This Engineering VP is a member of the R&D leadership team and plays a direct role in shaping company-wide engineering strategy, operating rhythms, and cross-functional alignment with Product, GTM, and Operations. You'll bring an instinct for using AI to move faster and more efficiently — not as a buzzword, but as a core operating principle for how your teams build, test, and ship software.
What You'll Do
- Build and Ship New Products: Lead engineering efforts to take new product definitions from concept through design, implementation, and launch. You thrive in the ambiguity of early-stage product development — defining technical approaches, making fast decisions with imperfect information, and iterating rapidly based on customer feedback and market signals.
- Scale What Works: Once a product finds traction, build the team, processes, and architecture to scale it. Design systems and organizations that grow without breaking — transitioning from scrappy v1 to production-grade, enterprise-ready products.
- AI-First Engineering Culture: Embed AI deeply into how your teams operate. From AI-assisted code generation and automated testing to agentic workflows and intelligent automation, your teams will ensure that Chainguard leverages AI to ship faster, reduce toil, and amplify engineering talent. You stay current on the evolving AI landscape and push your teams to adopt what works.
- Organizational Leadership: Build your organization from the ground up. Hire and develop ICs, Managers, and Directors who are energized by building new things and owning outcomes. Structure teams for speed and autonomy — small, vertical, full-stack teams that own their products end-to-end.
- Delivery Excellence: Own quarterly outcome commitments for your organization. Ship on aggressive timelines without sacrificing quality. Establish lightweight processes that create accountability and predictability without slowing teams down.
- People-First Culture: Champion servant leadership, retention, and career development across your organization. Build a culture of trust, psychological safety, and high ownership. Foster an internal promotion culture and invest in growing the next generation of engineering leaders at Chainguard.
- Cross-Functional Partnership: Partner closely with Product Management, Sales, Customer Success, and other functions to ensure new products are solving real customer problems and driving business outcomes. Serve as a clear communicator of engineering progress, tradeoffs, and risks to executive stakeholders.
- Technical Direction: Provide strategic technical guidance and ensure sound architectural decisions across your teams. You don't need to write code daily, but you do need to understand deeply technical trade-offs and help teams make the right calls on build-vs-buy, infrastructure investment, and system design — especially in the context of shipping new products quickly.
- Hiring and Talent Strategy: Build a high-performance hiring engine for your organization. Attract and hire engineers who are energized by greenfield development and comfortable with ambiguity. Balance seniority with growth and cost efficiency as you scale.
- Budget and Resource Management: Own and manage the engineering budget for your organization, including headcount, infrastructure spend, and contractor resources. Make wise investment decisions in partnership with Finance and the SVP of Engineering.
- Industry Presence: Represent Chainguard externally as a thought leader in open source, cloud-native security, and engineering leadership. Build relationships and credibility in the broader engineering and security communities.
What We're Looking For
- 15+ years of progressive software engineering and engineering leadership experience, including significant time leading organizations, and capable of managing a 50+ person engineering organization.
- Proven track record of taking new products from zero to one — you've built teams and shipped products in greenfield environments, not just maintained existing ones.
- Experience managing Directors and/or Senior Managers (manager-of-managers experience required).
- Track record of building and scaling engineering organizations at high-growth, venture-backed technology companies.
- Hands-on experience using AI tools (e.g., Claude Code, Copilot, or similar) in your own workflows, and a demonstrated ability to drive AI adoption across engineering teams. You see AI as an accelerant for engineering velocity and you've operationalized that belief.
- Deep understanding of cloud-native technologies, open source ecosystems, containers, Kubernetes, and software supply chain security.
- Strong organizational design instincts — you know how to structure small, fast teams for autonomy, velocity, and cross-functional alignment, especially in early-stage product environments.
- Demonstrated servant leadership style with a strong emphasis on retention, career development, and internal promotion.
- Excellent communication and executive presence — you can communicate the company's vision and strategy to internal and external audiences with clarity and conviction.
- Comfort with ambiguity, rapid iteration, and making high-stakes decisions quickly. You have a bias for action and a strong sense for when to invest deeper vs. move on.
- Experience operating in a fully remote, globally distributed engineering organization.
- Ideally based in the US, Canada, or the UK.
Our engineering team has adopted a set of core principles:
- Reduce complexity. Eliminate silos. De-duplicate redundancy. Deprecate outdated infrastructure. Eradicate the unnecessary. Utilize platforms. Standardize on reusable components.
- Empower individuals. Reduce friction. Unblock contribution. Enable self-service. Reward ownership. Trust one another.
- Engineer the value proposition. Build complete solutions. Innovate where it matters. Differentiate with proprietary technology. Source commodity tools.
- Ensure production excellence. Design for the future. Implement for the present. Architect for scalability, reliability, simplicity, and observability. Automate for speed, safety, efficiency, and security.