Staff Software Engineer, Sandbox Secrets (West Coast)

About Docker

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.

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The Role

As AI agents redefine software development, Docker is at the center of that shift, providing the local and cloud sandboxed environments that make interactive and autonomous agentic workflows trustworthy by default. At the heart of our trust model is the fact that user credentials and other sensitive secrets are injected at the sandbox layer and never exposed to an agent. An agent can never leak secrets it never sees.

The Secrets team builds the software that makes that possible, from easy-to-use SDKs to secure cloud services to high-performance network proxies. We operate at the intersection of the developer experience, enterprise governance, and security – delivering core security features that make Docker sandboxes the best way to run agents and other workloads safely.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Secrets team, you’ll design and build core security systems that power Docker’s agentic platform and AI governance products. Your work will focus on creating scalable, reliable, and secure software that enables developers to safely run agentic workloads while allowing administrators to confidently manage their organization’s security posture.

The successful candidate is a technical, product-minded engineer with deep experience building secure software and scale-out cloud services and a track record of shipping critical infrastructure. They think naturally about isolation and security boundaries, understand the tradeoffs involved in running untrusted or semi-trusted workloads safely, and can reason confidently about a system that spans multiple surface areas.

If you thrive on solving security and usability challenges, are enthusiastic about agentic development but conscious of the risks it entails, and want to help shape the future of Docker’s platform, we’d love to hear from you.

Please note: this role is currently prioritizing candidates currently located in the Western time zone (US or Canada).

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• Design, develop, and lead improvements to the secrets management and credential injection systems.

• Investigate and resolve security, correctness, performance, and stability issues across cloud, macOS, Windows, and Linux.

• Collaborate with peers, Product, and adjacent teams to evolve the architecture as requirements grow.

• Mentor engineers on the team and set the bar in design reviews and code reviews.

• Engage with the open source and agentic development community around sandboxing, MCP, and related ecosystems.

• Participate in on-call rotations and respond to critical stability issues affecting users.

• Document your work clearly and share knowledge with the rest of the team.

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Required

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with demonstrated technical leadership on production systems at scale.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

• Experience building developer tools, desktop applications, or runtime infrastructure used directly by developers.

• Familiarity with the agentic software development ecosystem: how coding agents work and how tools like Claude Code, Codex, or similar agents interact with their environment.

• Ability to reason about isolation and security boundaries: what a sandbox should and shouldn't expose, and how to make safe defaults obvious to users.

• Experience driving architecture and technical strategy across multiple engineers or teams.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

• Comfortable working with a high degree of autonomy in a remote-first environment.

Preferred

• Strong proficiency in Go, Rust, and/or Java

• Experience with cryptographic key management systems and techniques (key wrapping, HSMs, cloud KMSes, etc.)

• Familiarity with best practices for protecting credentials and secret material at-rest and in transit

• Understanding of networking, TLS, HTTP, and the like.

• Understanding of one or more OS-specific credential management capabilities.

Visa sponsorship: Docker considers visa sponsorship on a case-by-case basis based on business needs.

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Compensation & Equity

All full-time roles include equity. Final compensation is determined on factors including but not limited to experience, skills, qualifications, and location.

United States: $170,350 – $275,550 base

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Posting Information

• Open vacancy: This posting is for an existing open role.

• AI in hiring: Docker may use AI-assisted tools during our recruiting process.

• Interview recordings: Candidates will be invited to opt in to interview recordings to support interviewer calibration and consistent evaluations. Recordings are optional and require explicit consent.

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Perks & Benefits

• Remote-first by design – Work from your home, with offices in Seattle and Paris for connection and collaboration.

• Flexibility that fits your life – We trust you to manage your schedule while delivering great work.

• Time to recharge – Generous PTO, designated quarterly Whaleness Days, and a designated end-of-year Whaleness break.

• Home office support – Set up your workspace for comfort and success.

• Technology stipend – Equivalent to US$100 net per month to help support your work.

• Learning & development – Annual stipend for conferences, courses, certifications, and continued learning.

• Parental leave – 16 weeks of paid parental leave after six months of employment.

• Equity for all full-time employees – Share in Docker's long-term success as we continue to grow.

• Comprehensive benefits – Medical, retirement, and paid holidays vary by country.

• Docker swag – Because representing the whale never gets old.

Docker is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a team that reflects a broad range of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. We believe diverse teams build better products, make better decisions, and better serve our global community.

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