Senior Software Engineer, Secure Build

Role Description

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will turn these problems into practical product and technical outcomes. You will own substantial work from discovery and design through production, make sound security and reliability trade-offs, and stay close to the experience of developers and the agents they delegate work to.

Success in This Role Looks Like:

• Become an end-to-end owner for secure, reliable build infrastructure.
• Deliver a material secure-build or CI capability within your first year.
• Reduce operational risk in Docker Build Cloud or Auto Builds.
• Become a trusted partner to the teams and customers that consume the platform.

Responsibilities

• Turn developer, agent and security problems into clear requirements, staged technical decisions and measurable outcomes.
• Design, build and operate Go services and APIs that power Docker's build and secure-CI infrastructure.
• Develop isolation, identity, policy, provenance, attestation and signing capabilities for trusted build and test jobs.
• Work with container, OCI, BuildKit, cloud and isolated-execution technologies to deliver secure and reproducible workflows.
• Own features from technical design through rollout, observability, incident response and ongoing maintenance.
• Keep Docker Build Cloud and Auto Builds reliable, make targeted improvements that reduce operational load, and help their capabilities evolve towards the wider Secure Build direction.
• Make practical security trade-offs and use threat modelling to guide designs without blocking delivery.
• Design for a clear developer experience, including workflows initiated or consumed by software agents.
• Partner with Product, Security, Developer Experience, Registry and other platform teams on end-to-end customer workflows.
• Participate in the team's paid on-call rotation and drive improvements from incidents and recurring operational work.
• Communicate decisions, risks and progress clearly in a remote, async-first environment.

Qualifications

• 6+ 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.
• Strong backend engineering experience building and operating distributed systems in production.
• Production experience with Go and the ability to write, test, review and debug maintainable Go services.
• Experience with containers and build or CI systems, such as OCI, BuildKit, Buildx, GitHub Actions or comparable platforms.
• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure and a major cloud platform.
• A strong operational mindset covering observability, reliability, incident response and on-call ownership.
• Evidence of taking a feature or service from an ambiguous problem through production operation and measurable results.
• Working knowledge of security boundaries, identity, secrets and common software supply-chain risks.
• A strong product mindset and care for developer workflows, including experiences used by software agents.
• Clear written and spoken communication suited to a remote, async-first company.

Requirements

• Experience with Kubernetes (helpful, but not required).
• Experience with SLSA, in-toto, SBOM, VEX, Sigstore, cosign, provenance or artefact signing (helpful, but not required).
• Experience with sandboxing, microVMs, untrusted workload execution or multi-tenant infrastructure (helpful, but not required).
• Experience building hosted CI runners, remote builders or developer-platform infrastructure (helpful, but not required).
• Experience with agentic development workflows or building systems used programmatically by software agents (helpful, but not required).
• Experience evolving a legacy production system while delivering new capabilities (helpful, but not required).

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.