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