Staff Software Engineer, Developer Experience (Remote)

Docker, Inc.; England, Northern (AR, KY); Hybrid; USD 110,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first culture

Equity

Office locations Seattle and Paris

Job summary

Docker, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead ambiguous, cross-team backend work while staying hands-on in code. You will shape architecture, raise operational standards and drive initiatives across Clojure, Go and related systems.

Expect to mentor engineers, improve observability, and implement scalable, secure services. This role supports a remote-first culture with strong emphasis on developer experience and security.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering with leadership on production systems.
• Bachelor’s degree in CS, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience.
• Deep experience designing, building and operating production backend or platform systems.
• Strong programming ability in at least one production language; adaptable to new languages.
• Experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, APIs and cloud-native infra.
• Track record of leading cross-team initiatives and improving software outcomes.
• Strong technical and product judgement; ability to explain constraints and trade-offs.
• Operational mindset with emphasis on observability, resilience and on-call ownership.
• Comfort using AI-assisted engineering tools while owning the result.
• Clear written and spoken communication for remote, async-first collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for backend and developer-experience initiatives across Clojure, Go and related systems.
• Turn ambiguous 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.
• Lead cross-team delivery, surface risks early and remove blockers without formal authority.
• Recommend when to retain, evolve or replace components, reducing legacy dependencies.
• Partner with Product, Design, Security and other teams to connect tech investment to outcomes.
• Improve observability, incident readiness, performance and service ownership.
• Improve engineering leverage through automation and AI-assisted workflows.
• Mentor senior engineers, raise design quality and code-review standards.
• Stay hands-on through implementation, debugging and on-call rotation.
• Communicate decisions clearly in a remote, async-first environment.

Skills

Software engineering

Distributed systems

Leadership

Communication skills

AI-assisted tools

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Kafka

Spanner

Datomic

Job description

Docker, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead ambiguous, cross-team backend work while staying hands-on in code. You will shape architecture, raise operational standards and drive initiatives across Clojure, Go and related systems.

Expect to mentor engineers, improve observability, and implement scalable, secure services. This role supports a remote-first culture with strong emphasis on developer experience and security.