Docker

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Staff Software Engineer, AI Developer Tools

Work from home

Remote role where the employee must remain based in a particular country.

Listed for United States

From the employer's advert: United States: $170,350 – $275,550 + equity

Employer listed it 13 days ago · Added 10 days ago

First listed 13 days ago and still open.

Salary

$170,350 to $275,550

Location

Listed for United States

Work style

Async

Contract

Full-time

Experience

Lead

What the advert says

Quoted word for word from the employer's advert. Where it says nothing, we say so.

Working hours: This role may require participation in an on-call rotation to provide support outside of standard business hours, including evenings, weekends, and holidays, as needed.
Where you can work from: Location eligibility not confirmed
Contract: Equity for all full-time employees – Share in Docker's long-term success as we continue to grow.
Experience asked for: Not mentioned in the advert
Pay: Technology stipend – Equivalent to US$100 net per month to help support your work.

Remote flexibility

Work from home

This is a remote role, but the employee must be based in United States. It is work from home rather than work from anywhere.

What the employer says

Source listing states candidate location: "San Francisco, CA, Seattle, WA, Remote"

What Nomaders makes of it

Residency required in United States
Payroll and tax are likely handled in that country only

The quotes above are the employer's own words; the reading is ours. Always check the original listing and employment terms before working from another country.

Before you apply

Experience: employer states

Written as a nice-to-have

“Proficiency in Go (preferred), Rust, Java, or Python, with strong software engineering fundamentals”

Questions worth asking: Nomaders interpretation

The advert does not say where you can be based. Ask which countries they can legally employ or contract you from.

Produced automatically from this advert's text; not reviewed by a person. The employer's own page is the final word.

About 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.

_______________________________________________________________________

Docker is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to set the technical direction for key parts of our AI Developer Tools team. You will work at the intersection of AI, developer experience, and platform engineering, building the AI-powered tools and the platform that let teams across Docker prototype, deploy, and scale their own AI developer tools.

As a Staff Engineer you will own the technical design and delivery for two areas:

AI-Powered Developer Tools. Design and build AI agents and tools that accelerate developer productivity, surface observability insights, and automate operational reviews. You will help teams adopt an AI-native way of working and speed up adoption of tools such as Claude Code and Codex. Examples include AI-powered code review and refactoring assistants, automated test generators and local environment setup tools, deployment pipeline diagnostic agents, and agents that simplify on-call work during incidents.

Self-Service AI Developer Tools Platform. Design and build the platform infrastructure that lets product and platform teams across Docker unblock themselves by prototyping, building, and deploying their own AI developer tools. You will set the patterns and standards that let teams experiment, iterate quickly, and graduate successful prototypes into production-ready services.

You will report to the Senior Manager, AI Developer Tools, and work closely with the team's Principal engineers, engineering leadership, product engineering teams, and platform teams across Docker.

What Would Make Someone Successful in This Role

You are a hands-on technical leader who works well at the intersection of AI, developer experience, and platform engineering. You have shipped production systems built on LLMs and AI agents, and you can explain what worked and what did not. You think in platforms: you design something once so that several teams can move faster. You have clear opinions about what makes a developer tool good, and sound judgment about when to build, when to integrate, and when not to do either. You are comfortable in a fast-moving AI landscape and balance technical quality with shipping iteratively. Before you design, you ask about scale, users, and constraints rather than assuming them. You lead through influence and mentorship, and the engineers around you get better because you are on the team.

Responsibilities

Technical Leadership and Architecture

Set technical direction and own the architecture for AI-powered developer tools and the self-service platform within the team's roadmap

Turn ambiguous problems into clear requirements, plans, and staged decisions. Ask about scale, users, and constraints before designing, and write down your assumptions

Establish patterns, standards, and best practices for LLM integration, agent development, and production AI systems that the team and partner teams adopt

Shape platform capabilities including deployment frameworks (ArgoCD/GitOps), observability integration (Grafana), security controls, and operational tooling for AI developer tools

Design reliable, scalable infrastructure for hosting AI agents and developer tools

Recommend AI technology choices, LLM provider strategies, and agent orchestration approaches, and make the trade-offs explicit

Work with the Senior Manager and the team's Principal engineers to align technical decisions with business goals

Systems Design and Implementation

Design, build, and operate production AI agents for developer productivity, including code review assistants, test generators, deployment diagnostics, and incident response automation

Build self-service platform capabilities that reduce time-to-production for new AI tools from weeks to days

Build systems that speed up adoption of AI-native development tools (Claude Code, Codex) across Docker's engineering organization

Set and meet reliability, security, and performance standards for AI systems, including SLOs, monitoring, incident response, and cost management

Requirements

·8+ years of software engineering experience, with demonstrated technical leadership on production systems at scale
·Hands-on production experience building LLM-powered applications, AI agents, or AI-assisted developer tools
·Strong understanding of LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, and others), prompt engineering, agent orchestration frameworks, and practical uses of AI in software development workflows
·Track record of designing and building scalable distributed systems and developer-facing platforms
·Production experience with cloud-native infrastructure, including Kubernetes, GitOps deployment patterns, observability systems, and CI/CD pipelines

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.

How to apply

1Check the flexibility label above, work from home, matches where you plan to live and work.
2Tailor your CV to the role at Docker, mentioning your remote working experience and working hours (Async).
3Apply directly on the employer's careers page using the button below. Nomaders never handles your application.

Found 11d ago. Last checked today. Always confirm the details on the original posting, salary and location can change after publication.

Listing sourced from Company boards.