Staff Software Engineer, Docker AI Substrate - Docker

About Docker

Docker is a beloved brand in developer tooling, trusted by over 20 million monthly users and facilitating more than 20 billion container image pulls. Developers globally rely on Docker to build, share, and run applications across products like Docker Desktop, Docker Hub, and Docker Scout.

We are a globally distributed, remote-first team building foundational tools for software development. As AI agents transform software development, Docker provides the sandboxed environments, verified images, and secure infrastructure essential for trustworthy autonomous workflows.

The Docker AI Substrate Team

As AI agents take on more complex tasks, robust infrastructure becomes critical. Docker's approach is to provide agents with strong boundaries, reproducible environments and authority, and the flexibility to run workloads from a developer's laptop to the cloud. The Docker AI Substrate team extends this foundation to enterprise customers, enabling them to run agents at scale with the security, reliability, and control expected from critical systems. We are a small, senior team at the forefront of this work. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be instrumental in shaping the architecture, building core systems, and owning their operation.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the systems that deploy, release, and operate Docker's agentic platform for enterprise customers, utilizing Go and Kubernetes.
• Ensure the platform runs consistently across various cloud providers and environments, incorporating the security, identity, and network boundaries required by enterprises.
• Own the release and supply chain path, ensuring every deployment is reproducible, verifiable, and trusted.
• Take full production ownership, including on-call duties, managing SLOs, incident response, and developing operational tooling for stability.
• Set technical direction in collaboration with the team's architect and engineering leadership, and work with partner teams across runtime, developer experience, identity, and observability.
• Elevate technical standards through design review, rigorous testing discipline, and mentorship as the team expands.

Qualifications

Required

• Cloud Control and Management Plane Experience: You have built and operated software that provisions, upgrades, and monitors infrastructure for multiple tenants or environments in production, including on-call responsibilities. Experience from a cloud provider, managed-service vendor, or a platform team focused on environment stamping is highly relevant.
• Advanced Kubernetes: Beyond basic deployment, you have written controllers or operators, understand reconciliation and Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), and recognize the superiority of declarative over imperative approaches at fleet scale.
• Deep Cloud Expertise: Hands-on experience with compute, networking, identity, and managed services in at least one major cloud provider, with the ability to quickly learn a second.
• Production Ownership: Demonstrated experience with on-call rotations, incident response, SLOs, and post-mortems. You run what you build.
• Distributed Systems Design: Proficiency in designing fault-tolerant, consistent, and observable distributed systems, including idempotent reconciliation.
• Go: Professional proficiency. Docker's backend and all of this team's code are written in Go.
• Experience: 10+ years of professional software engineering experience in infrastructure, platform, or cloud services, with the judgment to set technical direction for others.

Strongly Preferred

• Kubernetes resource orchestration and cloud controllers, such as KRO.
• Release engineering and software supply chain expertise: OCI registries, digests, license compliance.
• Experience with private connectivity between cloud accounts: PrivateLink, VPC peering, service endpoints, egress policy.
• Building OpenTelemetry pipelines with multiple destinations.
• Experience building managed services.
• Familiarity with Firecracker, microVMs, or other isolated execution environments for untrusted code.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Compensation & Equity

United States: $170,350 – $275,550 + equity

Docker considers visa sponsorship on a case-by-case basis based on business needs.

Perks & Benefits

• Remote-first by design: Work from your home, with offices in Seattle and Paris available for connection and collaboration.
• Flexibility that fits your life: We trust you to manage your schedule while delivering great work.
• Time to recharge: Generous Paid Time Off (PTO), designated quarterly Whaleness Days, and a designated end-of-year Whaleness break.
• Home office support: Assistance to set up your workspace for comfort and success.
• Technology stipend: Equivalent to US$100 net per month to help support your work.
• Learning & development: Annual stipend for conferences, courses, certifications, and continued learning.
• Parental leave: 16 weeks of paid parental leave after six months of employment.
• Equity for all full-time employees: Share in Docker's long-term success as we continue to grow.
• Comprehensive benefits: Medical, retirement, and paid holidays (vary by country).
• Docker swag: Represent the whale with company merchandise.