Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Docker is a globally distributed, remote-first company building developer tools and secure infrastructure for software development. The Staff Software Engineer will lead ambiguous, cross-team backend and developer-experience initiatives while remaining hands-on with architecture, implementation, operational standards, and mentoring across a polyglot technology stack.
Responsibilities
- Set technical direction for major backend and developer-experience initiatives across Clojure, Go and adjacent systems
- Turn ambiguous product or platform problems into clear plans, staged decisions and measurable outcomes
- Design, build and operate distributed services, event pipelines, databases and APIs with strong security and reliability characteristics
- Lead cross-team delivery, surface risks early and remove technical or organisational blockers without waiting for formal authority
- Make pragmatic recommendations about when to retain, evolve or replace existing components, including the continued reduction of legacy Datomic dependencies
- Partner with Product, Design, Security and other engineering teams to connect technical investment to developer and business outcomes
- Improve observability, incident readiness, performance and service ownership across the Developer Experience estate
- Improve engineering leverage through appropriate automation, AI-assisted workflows and controls that preserve human accountability
- Mentor senior engineers, raise the quality of design and code reviews and create reusable patterns that multiply the team
- Stay hands-on through implementation, debugging and the team's paid on-call rotation
- Communicate decisions and trade-offs clearly in a remote, async-first environment
- Build context on Developer Experience products, customers, architecture and current priorities
- Pair across Clojure, Go, Datomic and Spanner-backed systems and ship a useful production change
- Understand the operational profile of the team's services, including on-call and recurring failure modes
- Build working relationships with Product, Design, Security and adjacent engineering teams
- Learn the team's AI-assisted engineering practices and identify where shared controls or workflows would improve them
- Lead the technical framing and delivery plan for one significant team or cross-team problem
- Contribute production code in the parts of the stack needed to move that work forward
- Identify and begin addressing a material reliability, observability, data or architectural weakness
- Establish a mentoring and design-review cadence that helps other engineers own larger decisions
- Be a trusted technical leader for Developer Experience and a sought-after partner across Docker
- Deliver at least one material product or platform outcome spanning multiple teams or systems
- Improve the reliability, clarity and delivery speed of the backend and data estate
- Shape pragmatic evolution across Clojure, Go, Datomic, Spanner and future technologies without turning technology choice into the goal
- Grow other senior engineers into broader ownership and reduce the number of decisions that depend on a small set of people
Skills
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, with demonstrated technical leadership on production systems at scale
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- Deep experience designing, building and operating production backend or platform systems
- Strong programming ability in at least one production language, with evidence of becoming effective in unfamiliar languages and codebases
- Experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, APIs, relational or distributed databases and cloud-native infrastructure
- A track record of leading complex initiatives that crossed team or organisational boundaries
- Strong technical and product judgement, including the ability to explain constraints, alternatives, customer outcomes and business trade-offs
- Evidence of influencing without authority and improving the effectiveness of other experienced engineers
- An operational mindset that treats observability, resilience, incident response and on-call ownership as part of engineering
- Comfort using AI-assisted engineering tools critically while retaining ownership of the result
- Clear written and spoken communication suited to a remote, async-first company
- Production experience with Go, Clojure or both
- Experience with Spanner, Datomic, Kafka or other distributed data and streaming platforms
- Experience with build systems, containers, artefact workflows or developer tooling
- Experience evolving a platform, database or language strategy without disrupting product delivery
- Experience building security or software supply-chain products
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.
Company Overview
Company H1B Sponsorship