Staff Software Engineer, Developer Experience

Docker is a globally distributed, remote-first company building developer tools and secure infrastructure for software development. The Staff Software Engineer will lead ambiguous, cross-team backend and developer-experience initiatives while remaining hands-on with architecture, implementation, operational standards, and mentoring across a polyglot technology stack.

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
• Build context on Developer Experience products, customers, architecture and current priorities
• Pair across Clojure, Go, Datomic and Spanner-backed systems and ship a useful production change
• Understand the operational profile of the team's services, including on-call and recurring failure modes
• Build working relationships with Product, Design, Security and adjacent engineering teams
• Learn the team's AI-assisted engineering practices and identify where shared controls or workflows would improve them
• Lead the technical framing and delivery plan for one significant team or cross-team problem
• Contribute production code in the parts of the stack needed to move that work forward
• Identify and begin addressing a material reliability, observability, data or architectural weakness
• Establish a mentoring and design-review cadence that helps other engineers own larger decisions
• Be a trusted technical leader for Developer Experience and a sought-after partner across Docker
• Deliver at least one material product or platform outcome spanning multiple teams or systems
• Improve the reliability, clarity and delivery speed of the backend and data estate
• Shape pragmatic evolution across Clojure, Go, Datomic, Spanner and future technologies without turning technology choice into the goal
• Grow other senior engineers into broader ownership and reduce the number of decisions that depend on a small set of people

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