Staff Software Engineer, AI Gateway — Secure Infra Lead

Docker; Oregon; Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 276,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first culture

Flexible scheduling

Generous PTO

Home office stipend

Learning & development stipend

Parental leave

Equity for all full-time employees

Comprehensive benefits

Technology stipend

Job summary

Docker is recruiting for a senior backend engineer to lead the AI Gateway stack, encompassing the model router, MCP gateway, and control plane. You will drive architectural decisions, own high-ambiguity problems, and collaborate with leadership to shape the product's next steps.

This remote-first role offers equity and broad impact across a global developer audience. You will mentor engineers, define technical direction, and partner with product teams to deliver secure, scalable infrastructure

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience with production-grade systems at scale.
• Deep specialization in distributed systems, cloud-native infrastructure, and API design.
• Experience building secure, high-throughput services (gateways, proxies, load balancers, policy engines).
• Fluency in Go and/or Rust.
• A track record of identifying systemic gaps - in architecture, process, or tooling - and driving the fix across team boundaries.

Responsibilities

• Define direction for core systems powering the AI Gateway 0 the model router, MCP gateway, and control plane - and make sure architectural decisions hold up as usage scales by 10x
• Consistently identify gaps in our infrastructure, process, or tooling before they become blockers, and drive the fix from idea to production
• Take a significant, hands-on role in defining, delivering, and implementing the Gateway's technical strategy, in close partnership with engineering leadership
• Own the hardest, highest-ambiguity problems in the system: dynamic model selection, auto-failover, cost-based routing, and policy enforcement that has to work end-to-end
• Act as the go-to expert for secure credential storage, session summarization, caching, and rate limiting - the capabilities everything else depends on
• Build the infrastructure that lets us, and our customers, evaluate, replay, and backtest agent and LLM behavior with confidence
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, and raise the technical bar for the team through code, design review, and example
• Partner with product, design, and leadership to shape not just what the control plane UI does, but where the product goes next

Job description

Docker is recruiting for a senior backend engineer to lead the AI Gateway stack, encompassing the model router, MCP gateway, and control plane. You will drive architectural decisions, own high-ambiguity problems, and collaborate with leadership to shape the product's next steps.

This remote-first role offers equity and broad impact across a global developer audience. You will mentor engineers, define technical direction, and partner with product teams to deliver secure, scalable infrastructure