About this role
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.
Docker Hardened Images (DHI) is Docker's catalogue of security-hardened, enterprise-grade container images and Helm charts, built to be minimal, up-to-date, and safe to deploy in regulated and security-conscious environments. We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to set the long-term technical direction for this catalogue and shape how the broader container security ecosystem evolves inside and beyond Docker.
At this level, you'll work across organizations, not just within one team. You'll set direction for major domains, resolve the highest-ambiguity problems in container supply chain security, and grow your impact through architectural leadership, cross-functional alignment, and influence on industry standards. This is a pure individual contributor role; influence comes through technical vision, design, and the ability to move organizations.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Own the architecture for DHI as a platform, making high-leverage decisions that define how images and Helm charts are authored, secured, distributed, and evolved across the entire catalogue and across Docker's broader product surface.
- Define and drive multi-quarter technical roadmaps for the container hardening domain, balancing upstream velocity, supply chain security posture, customer compliance requirements, and long-term catalogue scalability.
- Identify systemic patterns from customer, operational, and upstream signals and translate them into architectural changes that span the catalogue, not just individual images or charts.
- Build alignment across teams and executives on technical strategy, tradeoffs, and sequencing, including product, security, infrastructure, and customer-facing functions.
- Represent Docker as a trusted technical voice in escalations, key enterprise customer engagements, and upstream OSS communities on issues that shape the future of secure container delivery.
- Set conventions and standards at scale, defining the patterns others build within for image definition, Helm chart adaptation, hardening strategy, and supply chain tooling (Sigstore, SBOM, SLSA), and evolving those standards as the ecosystem changes.
- Drive the hardest, most ambiguous packaging problems where the right answer requires reasoning across upstream dynamics, securit