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

Docker•Palo Alto, CA

1d•$170,350 - $275,550•Remote

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

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.

Benefits

Remote-first by design
Flexibility that fits your life
Generous PTO
Designated quarterly Whaleness Days
Designated end-of-year Whaleness break
Home office support
Technology stipend – Equivalent to US$100 net per month
Learning & development – Annual stipend for conferences, courses, certifications, and continued learning.
16 weeks of paid parental leave after six months of employment.
Equity for all full-time employees
Comprehensive benefits – Medical, retirement, and paid holidays vary by country.
Docker swag