Principal Product Designer, Docker
Container Platform
$175-250k
Salary shown is applicable to the U.S., may differ in other areas. Offers equity.
More information about location
App development platform
Open for applications
App development platform
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$175-250k
Salary shown is applicable to the U.S., may differ in other areas. Offers equity.
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To simplify the lives of developers building world-changing apps.
Role
Who you are
- You have deep, informed opinions about how developers are changing what it means to build and ship software
- Ou're AI-native in your process: using tooling to move faster, synthesize earlier, and prototype first
- You're passionate about technology and even more passionate about the people that use it
- You tirelessly advocate for the developer and have deep empathy for the friction they hit every day
- You put their needs first, and you have strong opinions, loosely held, about how to serve them better
- The ideal candidate enjoys solving big problems with elegant solutions and has a strong track record of delivering extraordinary experiences for technical users
- You work quickly, think in systems, and understand the difference between a workflow that technically works and one that developers actually trust and return to time and time again
- You have excellent communication skills and a real ability to bring cross-functional teams along with you, from individual engineers and PMs to senior leadership
- You play well with others
- You thrive in a fast-paced, remote-first environment
- You bring a distinct point of view, you elevate the designers around you, and you're just as open to feedback on your own work as you are generous with it for others
- Proven track record influencing product direction and strategy with actionable, research-informed design
- Deep experience designing for developer tools, platforms, or infrastructure products
- Solid understanding of qualitative and quantitative research methods with an ability to synthesize and communicate quickly
- Fluency with prototyping, quick visualizations, and iterative development
- Demonstrated ability to learn new technology domains and develop strong opinions about them
- Excellent project management, communication, and presentation skills
- Experience leading, coaching, or mentoring product designers. We currently have a number of staff designers and senior designers and this role is expected to help level up the team as a whole. You’re not working in a silo, but rather defining design practice at Docker
- Familiarity with container technologies, DevOps tooling, or infrastructure products
- Empathy for developers as end-users; you understand their frustration with bad tooling personally
- Strong opinions, loosely held; you advocate hard and change up gracefully
- Humility and a genuine learning mindset
- Ability to explain complex ideas simply without dumbing them down
- Excellent written, verbal, and visual communication skills
- Reflective, accountable, and ownership-oriented
- AI forward design process: you're meaningfully integrated tooling into your design practice
What the job involves
- As a Principal Product Designer, you distill complex developer workflows into insights that shape design, product, and engineering decisions
- Docker is modernizing how millions of builders experience development. We're looking for a Principal Product Designer who is deeply passionate about bringing human-centered thinking to developer tooling and who is ready to help lead the redesign of our container platform from a place of genuine conviction about where the industry is heading
- Your ideas directly influence Docker's product direction and growth
- Own the end-to-end design for the container platform
- Distill complex developer workflows into elegant, opinionated solutions
- Collaborate and iterate with a cross-functional team of designers, product managers, and engineers
- Use AI tools actively throughout the design process for prototyping, synthesis, and iteration
- Work across stakeholders to build consensus on a shared product vision
- Constructively challenge existing approaches and push for better solutions
- Mentor and coach members of the product design team
- Partner with senior leadership to design strategy
- First 30 Days:
- Complete onboarding and ramp up on Docker Desktop, the CLI, and container platform systems. Go beyond surface level and understand how the pieces connect
- Audit all existing design work across the container platform: what has been tried, what shipped, what didn't, and why
- Shadow customer calls to start building a ground-level view of how people actually use the platform and where the friction lives
- By week 3, be sharing work and early thinking with the team. Not polished, just visible
- By the end of month one, have a working directional point of view on where the container platform needs to go
- First 60 Days:
- Build active relationships across engineering, product, sales, and support leadership
- Be actively designing and shipping work. Show up in critiques and stay in the flow with engineering and PM partners
- Establish your agentic workflow scaffolding: define how you are using AI tooling for prototyping, synthesis, and iteration, and get in sync with how the broader design team is working
- Crystallize a design-led point of view on where the container platform is headed and share it with your manager and team
- One-Year Outlook:
- Fully own the design of the container platform end to end across workflows, visual quality, and system coherence, with demonstrable improvement from where things were on day one
- Act as a genuine strategic thought partner to senior leadership on the container platform and Docker's broader direction
- Feed insight and craft back to the rest of the design team, especially admin and bridge-side designers. Show what principal-level work looks like in motion, not in a job description
- By year one the container platform should feel unmistakably better in workflow clarity, visual craft, and developer trust, and that should be traceable to your presence on the team
Our take
Docker supplies a hub and desktop solution to simplify the workflow of app development teams. Originally known for popularising the idea of containerising software, it saw itself outpaced by Kubernetes. However, the company has identified a problem with the growing complexity of containerisation, with some apps consisting of dozens or even hundreds of containers - which is what it now addresses.
Docker has had a difficult time in the past, with 2019 seeing it sell off its enterprise business, reduce its workforce by hundreds, and change its leadership team. As a well known brand and ecosystem for containerisation, however, it aims to lure developers back to its product as well as to take advantage of the growing global demand for app development.
Returning to focus on developers rather than large companies was certainly a gamble, but one that seems to have paid off. The company has returned to profitability and raised Series C funding in 2022, which has been used to hire new talent, ramping up its business, and continuing to develop and refine its product. On top of this bounce back to success, it's also embarked on a series of acquisitions to bolster its business.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
47% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 13 rounds)
Mar 2022
$105m
SERIES C
Mar 2021
$23m
SERIES B
Total funding: $526m
Company benefits
- 100% company paid medical premiums for employees and dependents
- Flexible Time Off Policy
- Employer Paid Holidays
- Generous Parental Leave (after 6 months of employment)
- Home Office Set Up Budget
- Monthly Technology Stipend
- Training Allowances
- Life and Disability Insurance
- Retirement Plans
- Virtual and In-Person Social Events
- Docker Swag
- Quarterly Hackathons
Company HQ
China Basin, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Don Johnson
(CEO)Prior to joining Docker in 2025, Don spent nearly 9 years at Oracle in various Engineering/VP roles. Before that, they spent over 7 years at Amazon as a Software Development Engineer and Principal Engineer.
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