Staff Engineer, Developer Experience — Remote & Equity

Docker; United States; Remote; USD 170,000 - 275,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Freedom & flexibility; fit your work

Whaleness Days & end of year break

Home office setup; comfortable remote

16 weeks parental leave

Technology stipend

PTO to enjoy personal time

Training stipend for conferences

Equity in company

Docker Swag

Medical benefits, retirement & country

Remote-first culture; offices in SEA &

Job summary

Docker is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead ambiguous, cross-team efforts from problem definition through measurable outcomes while staying hands-on in code. You will shape architecture, raise operational standards and drive outcomes across multiple teams and partner groups.

You will remain hands-on as you guide platforms, build and artefact workflows, data pipelines and security-integrated services, partnering with product and security teams to deliver value and speed with high

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

Backend design

Distributed systems

Leadership

Cloud-native

APIs

Security

Observability

AI tooling

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Go

Clojure

Spanner

Datomic

Kafka

Job description

Docker is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead ambiguous, cross-team efforts from problem definition through measurable outcomes while staying hands-on in code. You will shape architecture, raise operational standards and drive outcomes across multiple teams and partner groups.

You will remain hands-on as you guide platforms, build and artefact workflows, data pipelines and security-integrated services, partnering with product and security teams to deliver value and speed with high