Principal Software Engineer, AI Tools and Security (Seattle or SF Bay Area)

Docker's AI Tools & Security team is building the MCP Gateway, a product that empowers developers to connect, observe, and secure AI agents and tools. This Principal Backend Engineer will lead technical direction of the Gateway and related services, collaborating with Product, Design, and Security.

• 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
• May participate in on-call rotation

• 10+ years of backend engineering experience with production-grade distributed systems
• Technical leadership across multiple teams or domains
• Expertise in cloud-native systems, distributed computing, service-oriented architecture, performance optimization
• Experience building secure, resilient, high-throughput backend services with SLOs, observability, incident response
• Fluency in Go (preferred) or another modern systems language (Rust, Java, C++)
• Strong grasp of CI/CD, testing, source control, deployment automation
• Deep experience with AWS, Azure, GCP and infrastructure-as-code
• Bonus: Kubernetes, Docker, microservices, OpenAI/Anthropic LLM APIs, MCP specification

United States: $198K – $319K + equity

• Remote-first by design
• Generous PTO, quarterly Whaleness Days, end-of-year break
• Home office support
• Technology stipend ($100/month)
• Learning & development stipend
• 16 weeks paid parental leave after 6 months
• Equity for all full-time employees
• Comprehensive benefits (medical, retirement, paid holidays vary by country)