Staff Software Engineer, Docker
Infrastructure
$170.3-275.6k
Canada Salary Range CA$238,250 – CA$382,250. Plus equity all areas.
More information about location
App development platform
Be an early applicant
App development platform
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$170.3-275.6k
Canada Salary Range CA$238,250 – CA$382,250. Plus equity all areas.
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To simplify the lives of developers building world-changing apps.
Role
Who you are
- 8+ years of professional, hands-on, full-time software engineering experience in backend, infrastructure, or platform engineering
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- Strong software engineering in Go or a similar language: design, testing, debugging, review, long-term maintainability
- A track record designing, shipping, and operating cloud services or infrastructure platforms in production. We hire for skill and impact, not years
- Deep expertise in at least one of: Kubernetes, networking, cloud platforms, reliability engineering, or developer platforms, plus solid Linux, networking, and production-ops fundamentals
- Experience setting technical direction and leading work that needs cross-team alignment
- Clear written and verbal communication in a remote environment (RFCs, design docs, incident writeups)
- Nice to have: EKS and ingress/CNI/service-mesh experience; observability with OpenTelemetry/Prometheus/Grafana; CI/CD and progressive delivery (GitHub Actions, Argo CD, canaries); experience leading migrations or adoption programs across teams
- You don't need every item here. We value deep expertise in one area, strong systems judgment, and curiosity across the rest
What the job involves
- This is a Staff-level role, so success is measured by leverage rather than just your own commits. On a team this size you'll stay hands-on in the codebase while also setting direction, aligning teams on pragmatic standards, and carrying platform investments through to adoption. Concretely, you will:
- Take ambiguous infrastructure problems and turn them into proposals the org can rally around, then drive them through RFCs and architecture reviews across teams
- Design self-service capabilities and platform APIs (primarily in Go) for onboarding, provisioning, deployment, observability defaults, and day-2 operations, with contracts and docs teams actually use
- Set delivery standards using Terraform, GitOps with Argo CD, progressive rollout, and good testing, including building the continuous-deployment flow we're missing today
- Evolve the multi-tenant EKS foundations toward better reliability, security, scale, and cost: Envoy Gateway ingress, traffic routing, and the multi-region, cross-account connectivity we need
- Improve SLOs, alerting, and incident follow-up on Grafana Cloud so production gets safer and less dependent on heroics
- We judge this work by outcomes the consuming teams feel: how fast they can provision and ship, how much they can do without us, and how reliably it all runs
- We're actively investing in AI-assisted and agentic workflows to cut operational toil. We care that they stay safe, auditable, and human-reviewed. You'll help shape where these earn their place and where they don't. Early targets include:
- Alert enrichment and incident context-gathering: assembling the relevant signals, history, and runbook so the on-call engineer starts with context instead of a blank page
- Runbook-assisted diagnosis and remediation recommendations, with a human in the loop on anything that changes production
- Onboarding and readiness assistants that answer the questions our experts answer today
- If you've built operational automation and have a healthy skepticism about where automation belongs, this is a place to put both to work
- On-call. Operational ownership is part of the job. You'll join the rotation after onboarding and shadowing. As a Staff engineer, you'll also improve the health of on-call itself, with better alerts, stronger runbooks, less toil, and blameless postmortems aimed at prevention
- First 30 days:
- Build context, meet partner teams, ship your first change, shadow on-call
- First 90 days:
- Own a strategic platform problem with a clear plan and metrics; lead an improvement from design to production
- One Year Outlook:
- Lead a major cross-team initiative (for example, self-service provisioning of new regions and environments, or the multi-region networking and CD foundations behind it) and establish durable patterns that change how Docker engineers build and operate services
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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