VP, Engineering

About the Role

Lead a new product engineering organization at Chainguard, a leader in open source security, to rapidly bring innovative products to market. This is a critical builder role focused on establishing and scaling teams that will drive significant growth and shape the future of our product offerings.

Responsibilities

• Build and scale new product engineering teams from the ground up, defining their structure, processes, and operating rhythms.
• Lead the end-to-end product lifecycle, from concept and design through implementation, launch, and scaling.
• Embed AI-first principles into engineering workflows to accelerate development, enhance testing, and amplify team productivity.
• Own quarterly outcome commitments, ensuring aggressive timelines are met without compromising quality.
• Foster a people-first culture emphasizing servant leadership, psychological safety, retention, and career development.
• Partner closely with Product, GTM, and Operations to align engineering efforts with business objectives and customer needs.
• Provide strategic technical guidance and ensure sound architectural decisions for new product initiatives.
• Develop and execute a high-performance hiring strategy to attract top talent for greenfield development.
• Manage engineering budgets, headcount, and resource allocation effectively.
• Represent Chainguard externally as a thought leader in open source, cloud-native security, and engineering leadership.

Requirements

• 15+ years of progressive software engineering and leadership experience, with proven success managing organizations of 50+ engineers.
• Demonstrated track record of taking new products from zero to one in greenfield environments.
• Experience managing Directors and/or Senior Managers (manager-of-managers experience is essential).
• Proven success building and scaling engineering organizations within high-growth, venture-backed technology companies.
• Hands-on experience with AI tools (e.g., Claude Code, Copilot) and a demonstrated ability to drive AI adoption across engineering teams.
• Deep understanding of cloud-native technologies, open source ecosystems, containers, Kubernetes, and software supply chain security.
• Strong organizational design skills, with expertise in structuring small, fast, autonomous teams.
• Demonstrated servant leadership style focused on retention, career development, and internal promotion.
• Excellent communication and executive presence, capable of articulating vision and strategy clearly.
• Comfort with ambiguity, rapid iteration, and making high-stakes decisions quickly.
• Experience operating in a fully remote, globally distributed engineering organization.

Nice-to-Haves

• Ideally based in the US, Canada, or the UK.