Job description
We are looking for Software Engineers at Intermediate, Senior, or - for the right candidate - at Staff level.
These are remote positions and you can be based from anywhere in NZ.
Who are we?
At Portainer, we simplify enterprise-grade container management. From multi-cluster agility to remote-site efficiency, Portainer gives IT and OT teams the visibility, control, and ROI they need – without complexity or vendor lock-in.
At the core of our work is a commitment to making the complex simple. Whether customers are running Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, or edge compute, Portainer provides tools that are elegant, reliable, and designed to scale.
Our open-source product has achieved widespread adoption, with hundreds of thousands of active users and hundreds of millions of downloads. Supported by a strong group of international investors, we now serve organisations ranging from small businesses to large enterprises across the globe.
What does a Software Engineer do?
We are looking for Software Engineers to play a key role in delivering Portainer reliably at scale. This role will help shape the next generation of our product while strengthening engineering practices across the organisation.
You will work in an engineering team to help build the next versions of Portainer, while also raising the bar for our engineering practices and supporting those around you.
This is primarily an individual contributor role, with a strong expectation that you will proactively pick up and complete all tasks assigned to you. You will become an expert in a single aspect or area of the product, and people will look to you for assistance whenever it needs changing. You will contribute significant code and will start to coach others, especially on areas you are more familiar with.
Portainer is quite different from your average SaaS business. It is deployed directly into customer environments (often air-gapped) where it manages thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of devices reliably at scale. Our challenge is to keep up with a rapidly evolving tool ecosystem, simplify the experience for our customers, and ensure Portainer remains a mission-critical, reliable part of their infrastructure.
Portainer is open source, and you can view the code for our Community Edition at https://github.com/portainer/portainer. We use Go for our backend and JavaScript/React for the frontend.
There are four key aspects to this role:
- Craft: You are a capable engineer across a main skillset and can readily pick up others as needed. You will also become an expert in a single aspect or area of the product, and people will look to you for assistance.
- Collaboration: You contribute effectively and proactively to team meetings and brainstorming, both synchronously and asynchronously. At Senior and above you will start to coach others and communicate with other parts of the business as required.
- Impact: Your impact is measured by how effectively you complete your assigned work and proactively take on new tasks. You are a consistent, high-leverage contributor to your team’s goals, helping to ensure timely and effective delivery of projects.
- Values: You’ll be expected to model Portainer’s values, with a focus on “Muck In” by being happy to help out no matter what, and contributing to a positive, inclusive team culture.
Must haves:
- Expertise in Go with a proven track record of delivering and maintaining robust, production-grade software.
- Ability to work across multiple parts of the stack, including solid hands-on experience with Go and familiarity with front-end technologies as well as infrastructure concepts related to Docker and Kubernetes.
- Proven ability to coach engineers within your team through code reviews and one-on-one guidance.
- Strong written communication skills, with the ability to articulate technical concepts clearly to technical and non-technical team members.
- Proven ability to take ownership of complex projects, breaking them down into actionable tasks and driving them to completion.
Should haves:
- Industry knowledge (current trends in containerisation or Platform Engineering).
- Experience with a Javascript front-end framework (e.g., React, Vue, or Angular).
- Experience with automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and related tooling.
- Experience working effectively as part of a remote or hybrid team.
- Solid understanding of containerisation and orchestration fundamentals, including Docker and Kubernetes.
Nice to haves:
- Experience delivering B2B software, and/or collaborating with Sales and Customer Success/Support teams.
- Deep infrastructure and operations expertise, with hands-on experience running large-scale Kubernetes or Docker environments and understanding their impact on reliability, security, and usability.
- Experience building and maintaining software deployed into customer environments (on-premise, edge, or air-gapped), including packaging, upgrades, and lifecycle management.
If you’re excited by the challenge of building elegant solutions to complex problems, we encourage you to apply - we’d love to hear from you.
Portainer is growing rapidly and is already established in the enterprise space, but we’re still small enough that every engineer has a visible impact. Joining as a Staff Engineer gives you:
- Impact at scale: The opportunity to shape a globally adopted product and contribute to a fast-growing company with a strong enterprise focus.
- Competitive package: A strong remuneration package, with benefits including participation in our stock option plan and group insurance (NZ staff only).
- Flexibility with connection: The ability to work remotely within an async-first, time zone friendly culture, with occasional in-person meetups to build stronger collaboration.
- Global collaboration: The chance to work with a world-class distributed team, tackling complex technical challenges across diverse environments.
- Growth and development: Access to a huge amount of collective knowledge, along with training, mentoring, and development opportunities to help you continue levelling up.
