The role
ABOUT DOCKER
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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Docker is shipping a wave of new products this year, and we’re investing heavily in the platform underneath all of it. That platform supports hundreds of engineers and carries high-scale production traffic every day — and it has grown faster than its foundations. This year is about closing that gap.
Right now, too much of that work leans on a handful of experts unblocking the same provisioning and operational workflows by hand. The top priority for this role is turning that into paved roads: self-service systems with clear ownership, safe defaults, strong guardrails, and adoption we can measure — a platform teams trust enough to stop thinking about, so they can focus on their products instead of ours.
The concrete goal is on this year’s roadmap: spinning up a new region or application environment should take hours, not days. Getting there means building real multi-region, cross-account networking and a continuous-deployment flow teams can trust, then a self-service layer on top. We’re the container company building our own internal platform, so the bar for the easy path also being the safe path is high.
You’d join a team of four, growing to seven this year — this is one of those hires. We’re looking for a senior engineer who can own significant parts of this platform end to end, drive projects to real production adoption, and raise how the whole team builds.
RESPONSIBILITIES
This is a senior, deeply hands-on role. You’ll own significant components, drive projects from design through production adoption, and shape the platform’s technical direction while helping teammates grow. Concretely, you will:
- Turn ambiguous infrastructure problems into clear designs and working systems — contributing to RFCs and architecture reviews, and driving your projects to done.
- Build self-service capabilities and platform APIs (primarily in Go) for onboarding, provisioning, deployment, observability defaults, and day-2 operations — with contracts and docs teams actually use.
- Apply and help shape delivery standards with Terraform, GitOps on Argo CD, progressive rollout, and strong testing — including the continuous-deployment flow we’re missing today.
- Strengthen the multi-tenant EKS foundations for reliability, security, scale, and cost: Envoy Gateway ingress, traffic routing, and multi-region, cross-account connectivity.
- Improve SLOs, alerting, and incident follow-up on Grafana Cloud so production gets safer and less dependent on heroics.
We measure this work by outcomes the consuming teams feel: how fast they can provision and ship, how much they can do without us, and how reliably it all runs.
AI-ASSISTED OPERATIONS
We’re investing in AI-assisted and agentic workflows to cut operational toil, and we care that they stay safe, auditable, and human-reviewed. You’ll help shape where they earn their place and where they don’t. Early targets:
- Alert enrichment and incident context-gathering: assembling the relevant signals, history, and runbook so the on-call engineer starts with context instead of a blank page.
- Runbook-assisted diagnosis and remediation recommendations, with a human in the loop on anything that changes production.
- Onboarding and readiness assistants that answer the questions our experts answer today.
If you’ve built operational automation and have a healthy skepticism about where automation belongs, this is a place to put both to work.
ON-CALL
Operational ownership is part of the job. You’ll join the rotation after onboarding and shadowing, and help improve on-call itself: better alerts, stronger runbooks, less toil, and blameless postmortems aimed at prevention.
QUALIFICATIONS
- 6+ years of hands-on software engineering in backend, infrastructure, or platform engineering, though we weight real depth and impact more heavily than exact tenure.
- Strong software engineering in Go or a similar language: design, testing, debugging, review, and long-term maintainability.
- A track record of building, shipping, and operating cloud services or infrastructure in production.
- Deep expertise in at least one of Kubernetes, networking, cloud platforms, reliability engineering, or developer platforms — plus solid Linux and production-ops fundamentals.
- Experience shaping technical direction and working effectively across teams.
- Clear written and verbal communication in a remote environment (RFCs, design docs, incident writeups).
- Bachelor’s in CS/Engineering or equivalent practical experience.
Nice to have: EKS and ingress/CNI/service-mesh experience; observability with OpenTelemetry/Prometheus/Grafana; CI/CD and progressive delivery (GitHub Actions, Argo CD, canaries); driving migrations or adoption programs across teams.
You don’t need every item here. We value strong systems judgment, real depth in at least one area, and curiosity across the rest.
WHAT TO EXPECT
First 30 days
- Build context, meet partner teams, ship your first change, and shadow on-call.
First 90 days
- Own a meaningful platform component or project with a clear plan and metrics, and take an improvement from design to production.
One-year outlook
- Own a significant part of the platform and become a go-to for it — contributing to a major cross-team initiative (for example, self-service provisioning of new regions and environments, or the multi-region networking and CD foundations behind it) and establishing durable patterns your team relies on.
Docker considers visa sponsorship on a case-by-case basis based on business needs.
Compensation & Equity
United States: $160,900 – $260,700 + equity
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POSTING INFORMATION
- 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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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 is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a team that reflects a broad range of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. We believe diverse teams build better products, make better decisions, and better serve our global community.
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