Staff Software Engineer, Agentic Platform (Seattle, WA)

Docker has been one of the most loved brands in developer tooling, trusted by more than 20 million monthly users and over 20 billion container image pulls. From solo founders to the world's largest companies, developers rely on Docker to build, share, and run their applications across our suite of products including Docker Desktop, Docker Hub, and Docker Scout.

We are a globally distributed, remote-first team building the tools that define how software gets built and delivered. As AI agents redefine software development, Docker is at the center of that shift, providing the sandboxed environments, verified images, and secure infrastructure that make autonomous workflows trustworthy by default.

Join Docker's Agentic Platform team to build the foundational infrastructure powering the next generation of AI-driven workflows. Intelligent agents are rapidly becoming the primary interface between developers and complex systems and we're building the platform that makes them reliable, scalable, and observable at production scale.

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 Seattle, WA Metro Area.

We use Covey as part of our hiring and / or promotional process for jobs in NYC and certain features may qualify it as an AEDT. As part of the evaluation process we provide Covey with job requirements and candidate submitted applications. We began using Covey Scout for Inbound on April 13, 2024.

Please see the independent bias audit report covering our use of Covey here.

• 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

• 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

• 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