Lead Backend Architect, AI Tools & Security (Remote)

Docker; United States; Remote; USD 232,000 - 319,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Freedom & flexibility

Parental leave (16 weeks)

Equity

Tech stipend

Home office setup

PTO plan

Hackathons

Conferences stipend

Retirement plan

Medical benefits

Job summary

Docker is seeking a Principal Backend Engineer to lead the Gateway and related services in a remote-first, globally distributed team. You will shape architectural direction and deliver elegant APIs developers love to use.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with Product, Design, and Security, and own technical outcomes in a high-velocity environment, driving secure, scalable, high-throughput systems.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of backend engineering experience in production-grade, distributed systems.
• Technical leadership across multiple teams with architectural vision.
• Strong product mindset and impact on business outcomes.
• Designing large-scale, cloud-native systems with performance focus.
• Experience building secure, high-throughput services with SLOs and observability.
• Fluency in Go (preferred) or similar systems language; mentoring others.
• Strong fundamentals: CI/CD, testing, source control, deployment automation.
• Proven mentorship and cross-functional collaboration across teams.
• Experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP and IaC tooling.
• Ownership and bias for action in distributed remote teams.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical solution for a new product.
• Shape the product with Product and Design peers.
• Mentor other engineers and be the technical point of contact.
• Lead architecture decisions and guide long-term product strategy.

Skills

Backend engineering

Technical leadership

Cloud-native systems

Go

Distributed systems

CI/CD

Observability

Security engineering

Mentorship

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

OpenAI API

Anthropic API

MCP specification

Job description

Docker is seeking a Principal Backend Engineer to lead the Gateway and related services in a remote-first, globally distributed team. You will shape architectural direction and deliver elegant APIs developers love to use.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with Product, Design, and Security, and own technical outcomes in a high-velocity environment, driving secure, scalable, high-throughput systems.