Staff Backend Engineer, Developer Experience (Remote)

Docker; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; GBP 92,000 - 151,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first

Flexible schedule

PTO / time off

Home office support

Tech stipend

Learning stipend

Parental leave

Equity

Benefits vary by country

Docker swag

Job summary

Docker seeks a Staff Software Engineer to lead ambiguous cross‑team backend initiatives, shaping architecture while staying hands-on. You’ll own problem definitions, drive security and reliability, and elevate engineering practices across Docker Scout, Hardened Images and build pipelines.

In a remote-first environment, you’ll mentor engineers, partner with product and security, and establish repeatable workflows that improve delivery across platforms.

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
• 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.

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.

Skills

Software engineering leadership

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

APIs

Cloud infrastructure

Observability

AI-assisted tooling

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Go

Clojure

Datomic

Spanner

Kafka

Containers

Job description

Docker seeks a Staff Software Engineer to lead ambiguous cross‑team backend initiatives, shaping architecture while staying hands-on. You’ll own problem definitions, drive security and reliability, and elevate engineering practices across Docker Scout, Hardened Images and build pipelines.

In a remote-first environment, you’ll mentor engineers, partner with product and security, and establish repeatable workflows that improve delivery across platforms.