Principal Software Engineer, AI Tools and Security (US West Coast)

Docker, Inc is a leading brand in developer tooling, trusted by millions of users. They are seeking a Principal Backend Engineer to lead the technical direction of their AI Tools & Security team, focusing on building secure, developer-friendly AI infrastructure and collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver impactful solutions.

Responsibilities:

• Define the technical solution for a new product
• Help shape the product with peers in Product and Design
• Mentor other technical team members
• Be the technical point of contact for the team
• Take part in on-call rotation for your team; respond to incidents, debug production issues, and drive continuous improvement of system reliability

Requirements:

• 10+ years of backend engineering experience, including extensive work on production-grade, distributed systems at scale
• Technical leadership across multiple teams or domains, with a proven ability to drive architectural vision, set technical direction, and influence long-term product strategy
• Exceptional product and platform mindset—you think beyond implementation details to how technology shapes developer and business outcomes
• Expertise in designing and evolving large-scale, cloud-native systems, with deep knowledge of distributed computing, service-oriented architecture, and performance optimization
• Demonstrated experience building secure, resilient, and high-throughput backend services, with a strong grasp of reliability engineering principles (SLOs, observability, incident response)
• Fluency in Go (preferred) or another modern systems language (Rust, Java, C++, etc.), with the ability to lead technical design reviews and mentor others in language-specific best practices
• Strong grasp of software engineering fundamentals—CI/CD, testing strategy, source control, and deployment automation—applied in complex, multi-service environments
• Proven track record of technical mentorship and cross-functional collaboration, enabling teams to deliver high-impact, high-quality software efficiently
• Deep experience with major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and infrastructure-as-code tooling
• Ownership mentality with a bias for action and iterative delivery, balancing short-term impact with long-term architectural health
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Comfortable operating autonomously in distributed, remote-first teams, and leading through influence rather than authority
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and microservices architecture
• Prior experience with OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar LLM APIs, and the MCP specification