Staff Software Engineer, Agentic Platform (West Coast)

Docker•San Francisco, CA

12d•$170,350 - $275,550•Remote

About The Position

Join Docker's Agentic Platform team to build the foundational infrastructure powering the next generation of AI-driven workflows. Intelligent agents are rapidly becoming the primary interface between developers and complex systems, and we're building the platform that makes them reliable, scalable, and observable at production scale. You'll be working on the core agent execution runtime, orchestration primitives, and the cloud infrastructure that keeps the Agentic Platform running 24/7. This is a high-ownership role: you won't just build systems, you'll run them, respond when they fail, and drive continuous improvement across the stack. This is a greenfield opportunity to shape how agents are built and operated at scale. You'll work alongside seasoned engineers, collaborating with partner teams across AI infrastructure, developer experience, and platform reliability. For this role, we are prioritizing candidates who currently live in the West Coast (Pacific) time zone of the USA.

Requirements

8+ years of professional, hands-on, full-time software engineering experience in backend, infrastructure, or platform engineering.
Cloud Platform Expertise (AWS/OCI/Azure/GCP): Proven, hands-on experience operating production services in AWS or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure compute, networking, managed services, IAM, and cost management. This is a must-have; the Agentic Platform is a cloud-native service running 24/7.
Service Ownership in a Cloud Setting: You have owned production services end-to-end — on-call, incident response, SLO definition, and post-mortems. You don't just build; you run what you build.
Distributed Systems Design: Deep understanding of fault tolerance, consistency, observability, and scalability in cloud-native environments
Backend Engineering Proficiency: Strong proficiency in at least one backend language used for systems work — Go, Python, Rust, or Java
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

Nice To Haves

Professional proficiency in Go — Docker's primary language for backend systems
Experience with Terraform for cloud infrastructure provisioning and Helm for Kubernetes application packaging and deployment
Experience with PostgreSQL and Redis / Pub-Sub patterns for state management, caching, and event-driven agent workflows
Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol) server design and integration
Docker, Kubernetes, or equivalent — especially in the context of agent sandboxing and secure code execution environments
Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools: Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, Windsurf, etc. and the developer personas using them
Experience with LLM-as-judge frameworks, behavioral regression testing, and golden dataset management
Hands-on experience building or operating AI agent systems — including multi-agent orchestration, tool use, memory systems, or agent evaluation frameworks
Contributions or community engagement on relevant open source projects

Responsibilities

Design and operate the core agent execution runtime responsible for scheduling, state management, and lifecycle management of long-running agentic workflows
Build robust multi-agent coordination patterns: task handoff, agent memory (short-term and long-term), tool use, and workflow branching at scale
Develop context window management strategies and session persistence layers for stateful agent interactions
Build tooling for prompt engineering as a first-class engineering discipline — versioning, testing, and evaluation of prompts at scale
Build platform capabilities that support developers working in AI-assisted coding workflows, including IDE integrations, local-first development environments, and fast iteration loops
Own and operate Agentic Platform services in AWS or OCI infrastructure provisioning, scaling, cost management, and reliability
Provision and manage cloud infrastructure using Terraform; manage Kubernetes application packaging and deployment with Helm
Participate in the 24/7 on-call rotation
Carry genuine pager responsibility for the services you build and operate
Define and uphold SLOs; lead incident response, blameless post-mortems, and drive continuous reliability improvements
Instrument systems for observability: distributed tracing, structured logging, metric dashboards, and alerting
Partner with engineering leadership to set technical direction and serve as a guide and mentor as the team grows
Drive architectural decisions that balance velocity with long-term maintainability across a distributed, cloud-native stack
Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, designers, and partner engineering teams to integrate agentic capabilities into the broader developer platform
Contribute to a culture of engineering excellence through design reviews, RFC processes, and mentorship

Benefits

Freedom & flexibility; fit your work around your life
Designated quarterly Whaleness Days plus end of year Whaleness break
Home office setup; we want you comfortable while you work
16 weeks of paid Parental leave (after 6 months of employment)
Technology stipend equivalent to $100 USD net/month
PTO plan that encourages you to take time to do the things you enjoy
Training stipend for conferences, courses and classes
Equity; we are a growing start-up and want all employees to have a share in the success of the company
Docker Swag
Medical benefits, retirement and holidays vary by country