Principal Software Engineer, AI Tools and Security (Seattle or SF Bay Area)

Docker is a globally distributed, remote-first developer tooling company building secure infrastructure for modern software development. The Principal Software Engineer will lead the technical direction of the MCP Gateway and related backend services, define product solutions, collaborate with Product, Design, and Security, and mentor technical team members.

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
• This role may require participation in an on-call rotation to provide support outside of standard business hours, including evenings, weekends, and holidays, as needed
• Meet team members
• Build context about the problem space and prior art
• Provide feedback on current exploration and propose next steps in line with Product and Design
• Work with Product and Design on defining the product
• Attend customer calls
• Meet people across the company
• Help grow the team by participating in hiring loops
• Bring the product to market

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
• 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