The concrete version sits on this year's roadmap: spinning up a new global region or application environment should take hours, not days. Right now it takes days. Getting there means building the foundations underneath it. We need a real multi-region, cross-account network architecture and a testing and 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 is also the safe path" is high. You'd be joining a team of four, growing to seven this year (this is one of those hires), and we're looking for a Staff engineer to set technical direction and lead it through real production adoption.
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RESPONSIBILITIES
This is a Staff-level role, so success is measured by leverage rather than just your own commits. On a team this size you'll stay hands-on in the codebase while also setting direction, aligning teams on pragmatic standards, and carrying platform investments through to adoption. Concretely, you will:
Take ambiguous infrastructure problems and turn them into proposals the org can rally around, then drive them through RFCs and architecture reviews across teams.
Design 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.
Set delivery standards using Terraform, GitOps with Argo CD, progressive rollout, and good testing, including building the continuous-deployment flow we're missing today.
Evolve the multi-tenant EKS foundations toward better reliability, security, scale, and cost: Envoy Gateway ingress, traffic routing, and the multi-region, cross-account connectivity we need.
Improve SLOs, alerting, and incident follow-up on Grafana Cloud so production gets safer and less dependent on heroics.
We judge 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 actively investing in AI-assisted and agentic workflows to cut operational toil. We care that they stay safe, auditable, and human-reviewed. You'll help shape where these earn their place and where they don't. Early targets include:
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. As a Staff engineer, you'll also improve the health of on-call itself, with better alerts, stronger runbooks, less toil, and blameless postmortems aimed at prevention.
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QUALIFICATIONS
8+ years of professional, hands-on, full-time software engineering experience in backend, infrastructure, or platform engineering.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
Strong software engineering in Go or a similar language: design, testing, debugging, review, long-term maintainability.
A track record designing, shipping, and operating cloud services or infrastructure platforms in production. We hire for skill and impact, not years.
Deep expertise in at least one of: Kubernetes, networking, cloud platforms, reliability engineering, or developer platforms, plus solid Linux, networking, and production-ops fundamentals.
Experience setting technical direction and leading work that needs cross-team alignment.
Clear written and verbal communication in a remote environment (RFCs, design docs, incident writeups).
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); experience leading migrations or adoption programs across teams.
You don't need every item here. We value deep expertise in one area, strong systems judgment, and curiosity across the rest.
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WHAT TO EXPECT
FIRST 30 DAYS
Build context, meet partner teams, ship your first change, shadow on-call.
FIRST 90 DAYS
Own a strategic platform problem with a clear plan and metrics; lead an improvement from design to production.
ONE YEAR OUTLOOK
Lead 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 establish durable patterns that change how Docker engineers build and operate services.
Visa sponsorship: Docker considers visa sponsorship on a case-by-case basis based on business needs.
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COMPENSATION & EQUITY
All full-time roles include equity. Final compensation is determined on factors including but not limited to experience, skills, qualifications, and location.
Canada: CA$238,250 – CA$382,250 base
United States: $170,350 – $275,550 base
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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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