Senior Principal Software Engineer, Infrastructure (Seattle)

At Docker, we make app development easier so developers can focus on what matters. Our remote-first team spans the globe, united by a passion for innovation and great developer experiences. With over 20 million monthly users and 20 billion image pulls, Docker is the #1 tool for building, sharing, and running apps—trusted by startups and Fortune 100s alike. We’re growing fast and just getting started. Come join us for a whale of a ride!

Docker is seeking a Senior Principal Engineer to serve as the technical visionary and architect for our Bridge organization—the foundational platform that powers accounts, billing, data, developer tools and enterprise governance across all Docker products. This is one of the most impactful individual contributor roles at Docker, responsible for defining and driving the technical strategy that enables Docker's transformation from a collection of individual products into a unified enterprise platform capable of supporting our next phase of growth.

As Senior Principal Engineer, you will establish strategic technical plans that span multiple engineering organizations, make critical architectural decisions that affect Docker's entire product portfolio, and drive execution of cross-company programs that directly enable revenue generation. You'll work at the intersection of Accounts, Billing, Data, Platform Infrastructure, Developer Tools and Enterprise Governance, ensuring these foundational systems work together seamlessly to support Docker's business model evolution from seat-based to usage-based pricing, our expansion into AI and security products, and our growth from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of enterprise customers.

This role requires someone who combines deep technical expertise across multiple domains with the business acumen to translate Docker's commercial strategy into platform capabilities. You'll be recognized across Docker as the definitive expert on platform architecture, consulted by executives on strategic technical decisions, and responsible for ensuring that every product team can launch enterprise-ready features rapidly because the platform handles the complexity underneath.

Responsibilities

Technical Vision & Strategic Planning

• Define and own the multi-year technical vision for Docker's foundational platform, encompassing accounts, billing, data, enterprise governance, and infrastructure

• Establish strategic plans and objectives for major platform initiatives, making architectural decisions that ensure effective achievement of Docker's business objectives

• Contribute to and drive the strategic vision in collaboration with the VP of Engineering, translating organizational strategy into technical roadmaps that span multiple teams and years

• Identify and prioritize platform investments that provide maximum leverage—capabilities built once that enable rapid iteration across all Docker products

• Develop architectural principles and standards that guide technical decisions across the Bridge organization and influence product engineering teams

• Anticipate future business needs and ensure platform architecture provides the flexibility to support Docker's evolving commercial models

Cross-Company Technical Leadership

• Lead large cross-company programs that require coordination across Desktop, Hub, AI, Security, Cloud, and Platform teams

• Architect the unified platform interfaces (Control Planes) that enable product teams to answer canonical questions like Can this user access this feature? or How much has this organization consumed? without understanding underlying complexity

• Drive convergence of fragmented systems across Docker—replacing product-specific implementations with shared platform capabilities for authentication, authorization, billing, and observability

• Establish technical contracts between platform and product teams that enable independent velocity while ensuring consistency and reliability

• Lead architectural reviews for major initiatives across Docker, ensuring alignment with platform strategy and long-term maintainability

• Proactively identify and solve problems that impact critical areas of the business before they become blockers

Billing & Monetization Platform Architecture

• Architect the Billing Control Plane that enables Docker to launch new product SKUs in weeks instead of months

• Design the Usage-Based Billing platform that supports sophisticated pricing models combining base fees, per-seat charges, consumption pricing, and volume discounts

• Ensure billing architecture supports Docker's commercial flexibility—enabling bundle pricing, enterprise contract structures, and rapid pricing experimentation

• Define the metering infrastructure where products simply report usage events and the platform handles aggregation, rating, invoicing, and revenue recognition

• Architect billing systems that scale to support Docker's growth while maintaining the accuracy and audibility that enterprise customers and finance require

Accounts & Identity Platform Architecture

• Design the metadata-driven identity platform that serves as the single source of truth for authentication, authorization, and access control across all Docker products

• Architect account infrastructure that supports Docker's enterprise requirements—domain-based account ownership, organization lifecycle management, and namespace separation

• Define the Centralized Access Control Service that becomes the standard authorization point for all Docker products, replacing fragmented team-specific solutions

• Ensure identity architecture supports both consumer simplicity and enterprise complexity—from individual developers to organizations with thousands of managed accounts

• Design migration paths that transition millions of existing users seamlessly while introducing new capabilities progressively

Enterprise Governance Platform Architecture

• Architect the Unified Internal Access Control Endpoint that abstracts entitlements, permissions, settings, policies, and feature flags into a single source of truth for all product teams

• Design the Enterprise Command Center architecture that provides consolidated administrative experience across all Docker products

• Define group management and RBAC architecture that supports global, group, and user-level policy scoping with IdP synchronization

• Architect high-volume audit logging infrastructure and observability platform that meets enterprise compliance requirements (SOC 2, ISO 27001) and integrates with enterprise SIEM tools

• Ensure governance architecture enables Docker to launch any new product enterprise-ready from day one with baseline governance controls

Data Platform Architecture

• Define canonical data models that serve as the foundation for analytics, reporting, and machine learning across Docker

• Architect real-time streaming infrastructure that enables immediate reactions to customer behavior—usage spikes, security anomalies, expansion opportunities

• Design self-service data capabilities that democratize access while maintaining governance and accuracy

• Ensure data architecture supports both operational needs (real-time dashboards, alerts) and analytical needs (business intelligence, forecasting)

• Drive convergence to eliminate conflicting metrics that undermine trust in business decisions

Infrastructure & Developer Experience Architecture

• Define the infrastructure platform vision that removes infrastructure as a bottleneck to innovation—enabling teams to deploy experimental services in minutes, not weeks

• Architect standardized deployment patterns that encode best practices for security, scaling, monitoring, and reliability

• Design infrastructure that specifically supports AI and agent initiatives—rapid deployment, programmatic environment creation, consistent APIs

• Establish observability standards that provide distributed tracing, metrics, log aggregation, and error tracking out of the box for every service

• Drive cost optimization across platform infrastructure while maintaining performance and reliability standards

Technical Excellence & Influence

• Work with senior managers and directors across the Bridge organization to drive operations and strategy

• Mentor and develop Staff and Principal engineers, raising the technical bar across the organization

• Represent Docker's platform architecture externally through blog posts, conference talks, and technical community engagement

• Participate in executive-level discussions on technical strategy, providing architectural perspective on business decisions

• Drive build-vs-buy decisions for critical platform components, evaluating vendor solutions against Docker's specific requirements

Qualifications

Required

Technical Expertise

• 15+ years of software engineering experience with demonstrated expertise across multiple platform domains (identity, billing, data, infrastructure)

• Proven track record architecting and delivering large-scale distributed systems serving millions of users and thousands of enterprise customers

• Deep expertise in at le]]>