Staff Software Engineer, Docker AI Substrate (Seattle or Palo Alto)

As agents take on bigger jobs, the infrastructure around them matters more. Docker's answer is to give every agent a strong boundary, make its environment and authority reproducible, and let the work run where it makes sense, from a developer's laptop to the cloud. The Docker AI Substrate team brings that foundation to the enterprise: the largest companies in the world, running agents at scale, with the security, reliability, and control they expect from any critical system.

We are a small, senior team at the start of that work. As a Staff Software Engineer here, you will shape the architecture, build the core systems, and run what you build.

Locations: Seattle, WA or Palo Alto, CA.

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• Design and build the systems that deploy, release, and operate Docker's agentic platform for enterprise customers, in Go and on Kubernetes.
• Make the platform run consistently across cloud providers and environments, with the security, identity, and network boundaries enterprises require.
• Own the release and supply chain path so every deployment is reproducible, verifiable, and trusted.
• Run what you build: production ownership, on-call, SLOs, incident response, and the operational tooling that keeps it boring.
• Set technical direction with the team's architect and engineering leadership, and work with partner teams across runtime, developer experience, identity, and observability.
• Raise the bar through design review, testing discipline, and mentorship as the team grows.
• Take part in on-call rotation for your team, respond to incidents, debug production issues, and drive continuous improvement of system reliability

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• You have built and operated a cloud control and management plane. Software that provisions, upgrades, and watches infrastructure for many tenants or environments, in production, with a pager. Experience at a cloud provider, a managed-service vendor, or a platform team that stamps out environments.
• Kubernetes beyond deployment. You have written controllers or operators, understand reconciliation and CRDs, and know why declarative beats imperative at fleet scale.
• Deep in at least one major cloud. Hands-on with compute, networking, identity, and managed services, and able to pick up a second cloud fast.
• Production ownership. On-call, incident response, SLOs, post-mortems. You run what you build.
• Distributed systems design. Fault tolerance, consistency, observability, idempotent reconciliation.
• Go. Professional proficiency. Docker's backend and all of this team's code is Go.
• 10+ years of professional software engineering in infrastructure, platform, or cloud services, with the judgment to set direction for others.

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

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

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• Open vacancy: This posting is for an existing open role.
• AI in hiring: Docker may use AI-assisted tools during our recruiting process.
• Interview recordings: Candidates will be invited to opt in to interview recordings to support interviewer calibration and consistent evaluations. Recordings are optional and require explicit consent.

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Compensation & equity

All full-time roles include equity. Final compensation is determined on factors including but not limited to experience, skills, qualifications, and location.

United States: $170,350 – $275,550 base

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Perks & benefits

• Remote-first by design – Work from your home, with offices in Seattle and Paris for connection and collaboration.
• Flexibility that fits your life – We trust you to manage your schedule while delivering great work.
• Time to recharge – Generous PTO, designated quarterly Whaleness Days, and a designated end-of-year Whaleness break.
• Home office support – 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 – Because representing the whale never gets old.

Docker has been one of the most loved brands in developer tooling, trusted by more than 20 million monthly users and over 20 billion container image pulls. From solo founders to the world's largest companies, developers rely on Docker to build, share, and run their applications across our suite of products including Docker Desktop, Docker Hub, and Docker Scout.

We are a globally distributed, remote-first team building the tools that define how software gets built and delivered. As AI agents redefine software development, Docker is at the center of that shift, providing the sandboxed environments, verified images, and secure infrastructure that make autonomous workflows trustworthy by default.

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