Staff Software Engineer, Agentic Platform

Role Description

Join Docker's Agentic Platform team to build the foundational infrastructure powering the next generation of AI-driven workflows. You'll be working on the core agent execution runtime, orchestration primitives, and the cloud infrastructure that keeps the Agentic Platform running 24/7. This is a high-ownership role: you won't just build systems, you'll run them, respond when they fail, and drive continuous improvement across the stack.

This is a greenfield opportunity to shape how agents are built and operated at scale. You'll work alongside seasoned engineers, collaborating with partner teams across AI infrastructure, developer experience, and platform reliability.

Please note: for this role, we are prioritizing candidates who currently live in the West Coast (Pacific) time zone of the USA.

Responsibilities/What you'll work on:

• Agent Workflow & Orchestration
  • Design and operate the core agent execution runtime responsible for scheduling, state management, and lifecycle management of long-running agentic workflows.
  • Build robust multi-agent coordination patterns: task handoff, agent memory (short-term and long-term), tool use, and workflow branching at scale.
  • Develop context window management strategies and session persistence layers for stateful agent interactions.
  • Build tooling for prompt engineering as a first-class engineering discipline — versioning, testing, and evaluation of prompts at scale.
  • Build platform capabilities that support developers working in AI-assisted coding workflows, including IDE integrations, local-first development environments, and fast iteration loops.
• Cloud Infrastructure & Service Ownership
  • Own and operate Agentic Platform services in AWS or OCI infrastructure provisioning, scaling, cost management, and reliability.
  • Provision and manage cloud infrastructure using Terraform; manage Kubernetes application packaging and deployment with Helm.
  • Participate in the 24/7 on-call rotation.
  • This role may require participation in a 24/7 on-call rotation for the Agentic Platform; carry genuine pager responsibility for the services you build and operate.
  • Define and uphold SLOs; lead incident response, blameless post-mortems, and drive continuous reliability improvements.
  • Instrument systems for observability: distributed tracing, structured logging, metrics dashboards, and alerting.
• Technical Leadership
  • As a Staff Engineer, partner with engineering leadership to set technical direction and serve as a guide and mentor as the team grows.
  • Drive architectural decisions that balance velocity with long-term maintainability across a distributed, cloud-native stack.
  • Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, designers, and partner engineering teams to integrate agentic capabilities into the broader developer platform.
  • Contribute to a culture of engineering excellence through design reviews, RFC processes, and mentorship.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional, hands-on, full-time software engineering experience in backend, infrastructure, or platform engineering.
• Cloud Platform Expertise (AWS/OCI/Azure/GCP): Proven, hands-on experience operating production services in AWS or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure compute, networking, managed services, IAM, and cost management.
• Service Ownership in a Cloud Setting: You have owned production services end-to-end — on-call, incident response, SLO definition, and post-mortems.
• Distributed Systems Design: Deep understanding of fault tolerance, consistency, observability, and scalability in cloud-native environments.
• Backend Engineering Proficiency: Strong proficiency in at least one backend language used for systems work — Go, Python, Rust, or Java.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Requirements

• Strongly Preferred:
  • Go: Professional proficiency in Go — Docker's primary language for backend systems.
  • Infrastructure as Code: Experience with Terraform for cloud infrastructure provisioning and Helm for Kubernetes application packaging and deployment.
  • Data Infrastructure: Experience with PostgreSQL and Redis / Pub-Sub patterns for state management, caching, and event-driven agent workflows.
  • MCP & Agent Tooling: Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol) server design and integration.
  • Container & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, or equivalent — especially in the context of agent sandboxing and secure code execution environments.
  • AI-assisted development tools: Familiarity with Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, Windsurf, etc. and the developer personas using them.
  • Agent Evaluation: Experience with LLM-as-judge frameworks, behavioral regression testing, and golden dataset management.
  • Agent Systems Experience: Hands-on experience building or operating AI agent systems — including multi-agent orchestration, tool use, memory systems, or agent evaluation frameworks.
  • Open Source: Contributions or community engagement on relevant open source projects.

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.