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Salary: USD 170,350 - 275,550 / annual
Docker is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Docker AI Substrate team, a small, senior group building infrastructure for enterprise-scale AI agents. Docker is a globally distributed, remote-first company trusted by 20+ million monthly users and 20+ billion container image pulls. As AI agents take on larger workloads, Docker's AI Substrate provides the sandboxed environments, verified images, and secure infrastructure that make autonomous workflows trustworthy by default.
In this role, you will shape the architecture and build core systems that deploy, release, and operate Docker's agentic platform for enterprise customers. You will design and build systems in Go and on Kubernetes that deploy, release, and operate the platform. Key responsibilities include:
- Design and build systems that deploy, release, and operate Docker's agentic platform for enterprise customers, using Go and Kubernetes.
- Ensure the platform runs consistently across cloud providers and environments with enterprise-grade security, identity, and network boundaries.
- Own the release and supply chain path to ensure every deployment is reproducible, verifiable, and trusted.
- Take production ownership: on-call rotations, SLOs, incident response, and operational tooling.
- Set technical direction with the team's architect and engineering leadership, collaborating with partner teams across runtime, developer experience, identity, and observability.
- Raise the bar through design review, testing discipline, and mentorship as the team grows.
Docker offers a remote-first work environment with offices in Seattle and Paris for collaboration. Benefits include generous PTO with quarterly Whaleness Days, home office support, a $100/month technology stipend, annual learning & development budget, 16 weeks paid parental leave, equity for all full-time employees, and comprehensive medical and retirement benefits.
REQUIREMENTS
Required:
- 10+ years of professional software engineering in infrastructure, platform, or cloud services, with judgment to set technical direction.
- Proven experience building and operating a cloud control and management plane (provisioning, upgrades, infrastructure monitoring for multiple tenants/environments in production with on-call responsibilities). Background at a cloud provider, managed-service vendor, or platform team is expected.
- Deep Kubernetes expertise beyond deployment: written controllers or operators, understand reconciliation and CRDs, and know why declarative approaches scale better than imperative at fleet scale.
- Deep hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (compute, networking, identity, managed services); ability to quickly pick up a second cloud.
- Production ownership experience: on-call rotations, incident response, SLOs, post-mortems.
- Distributed systems design knowledge: fault tolerance, consistency, observability, idempotent reconciliation.
- Professional proficiency in Go. Docker's backend and all team code is in Go.
Strongly Preferred:
- Kubernetes resource orchestration and cloud controllers (e.g., KRO).
- Release engineering and software supply chain experience: OCI registries, digests, license compliance.
- Private connectivity between cloud accounts: PrivateLink, VPC peering, service endpoints, egress policy.
- OpenTelemetry pipelines with multiple destinations.
- Managed services building experience.
- Firecracker, microVMs, or other isolated execution environments for untrusted code.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
