Senior Software Engineer, Sandboxes (London or East Coast Preferred)

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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The Docker Sandboxes team is building the runtime that lets AI coding agents run safely on a developer's machine: disposable, isolated microVM sandboxes that each get their own Docker daemon, filesystem, and network.

This is the core of Docker's sbx product: developers can give an agent the autonomy it needs to get real work done without it ever touching the host, and tear the whole environment down when it's finished.

The successful candidate is a technical, product-minded engineer with deep experience building secure, isolated runtime environments (sandboxes, containers, or VMs) and a track record of shipping and owning that kind of infrastructure in production at scale. They think naturally about isolation and security boundaries, understand the tradeoffs involved in running untrusted or semi-trusted workloads safely, and can reason confidently about a system that spans multiple surface areas.

They can drive clarity and consensus on hard, ambiguous problems that cross team and component boundaries, raise the bar for engineering quality wherever they work, thrive in a remote-first environment, communicate clearly across time zones, work with our users, while bringing curiosity and craftsmanship to hard problems.

Please note: this role is currently prioritizing candidates currently located in the Eastern time zone (US or Canada), or in the EU.

Responsibilities

Design, develop, and lead improvements to the sandboxes product across agent integration, tool permissions, and developer-facing workflows.

Investigate and resolve correctness, performance, and stability issues in the agent integration layer across macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Drive the reliability and performance of sandbox creation, session management, and teardown for AI agent workloads.

Collaborate with peers, Product, and adjacent teams to evolve the architecture as requirements grow.

Mentor engineers on the team and set the bar in design reviews and code reviews.

Engage with the open source and agentic development community around sandboxing, MCP, and related ecosystems.

Participate in on-call rotations and respond to critical stability issues affecting users.

Document your work clearly and share knowledge with the rest of the team.

Qualifications

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

Experience building developer tools, desktop applications, or runtime infrastructure used directly by developers.

Familiarity with the agentic software development ecosystem: how coding agents work and how tools like Claude Code, Codex, or similar agents interact with their environment.

Ability to reason about isolation and security boundaries: what a sandbox should and shouldn't expose, and how to make safe defaults obvious to users.

Experience driving architecture and technical strategy across multiple engineers or teams.