Staff Software Engineer, Developer Experience

Role Description

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will lead ambiguous, cross-team work from problem definition through measurable outcomes. You will remain hands-on in code while shaping architecture, raising operational standards and creating enough clarity for several engineers and partner teams to move quickly. Work may span developer-facing features, build and artefact workflows, data and event pipelines, platform evolution and integrations with Docker's build and security systems.

Success in This Role Looks Like:

• Finding the highest-leverage problem, creating momentum before every detail is known and bringing people with you.
• Within your first year, teams should be delivering more confidently because you have made system boundaries clearer, reduced operational risk, connected technical choices to customer outcomes and helped senior engineers take on larger work.

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.

Qualifications

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Benefits

• Freedom & flexibility; fit your work around your life.
• Designated quarterly Whaleness Days plus end of year Whaleness break.
• Home office setup; we want you comfortable while you work.
• 16 weeks of paid Parental leave (after 6 months of employment).
• Technology stipend equivalent to $100 USD net/month.
• PTO plan that encourages you to take time to do the things you enjoy.
• Training stipend for conferences, courses and classes.
• Equity; we are a growing start-up and want all employees to have a share in the success of the company.
• Docker Swag.
• Medical benefits, retirement and holidays vary by country.
• Remote-first culture, with offices in Seattle and Paris.