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’s AI Tools & Security team is building the foundation for the next generation of secure, developer-friendly AI infrastructure. Our flagship product, the MCP Gateway, empowers developers to connect, observe, and secure AI agents and tools across the entire lifecycle—from prototype to production. We’re defining how developers safely harness the power of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) in real-world environments.
We’re looking for a Principal Backend Engineer who thrives at the intersection of AI, security, and developer experience. You’ll lead the technical direction of the Gateway and related services, collaborating closely with Product, Design, and Security to deliver elegant frameworks and APIs that developers love to use. This is a high-velocity, high-ownership environment: you’ll ship fast, iterate constantly, and help shape the future of secure agent-based development.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Define the technical solution for a new product
- Help shape the product with peers in Product and Design
- Mentor other technical team members
- Be the technical point of contact for the team
- This role may require participation in an on-call rotation to provide support outside of standard business hours, including evenings, weekends, and holidays, as needed.
QUALIFICATIONS:
REQUIRED:
- 10+ years of backend engineering experience, including extensive work on production-grade, distributed systems at scale.
- Technical leadership across multiple teams or domains, with a proven ability to drive architectural vision, set technical direction, and influence long-term product strategy.
- Exceptional product and platform mindset—you think beyond implementation details to how technology shapes developer and business outcomes.
- Expertise in designing and evolving large-scale, cloud-native systems, with deep knowledge of distributed computing, service-oriented architecture, and performance optimization.
- Demonstrated experience building secure, resilient, and high-throughput backend services, with a strong grasp of reliability engineering principles (SLOs, observability, incident response).
- Fluency in Go (preferred) or another modern systems language (Rust, Java, C++, etc.), with the ability to lead technical design reviews a