Staff Software Engineer, Developer Experience

Docker, Inc. is a globally distributed, remote-first company that builds developer tools including Docker Desktop, Docker Hub and Docker Scout. The Staff Software Engineer will lead ambiguous, cross-team backend and developer-experience initiatives, remaining hands-on while shaping architecture, improving operational standards, mentoring engineers and advancing distributed systems, data pipelines and platform capabilities.

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

Requirements:

• • 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
• • Production experience with Go, Clojure or both
• • Experience with Spanner, Datomic, Kafka or other distributed data and streaming platforms
• • Experience with build systems, containers, artefact workflows or developer tooling
• • Experience evolving a platform, database or language strategy without disrupting product delivery
• • Experience building security or software supply-chain products