Principal Software Engineer, AI Developer Tools

Principal Software Engineer, AI Developer Tools

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This range is provided by Docker, Inc. Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

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At Docker, we make app development easier so developers can focus on what matters. Our remote‑first team spans the globe, united by a passion for innovation and great developer experiences. With over 20 million monthly users and 20 billion image pulls, Docker is the #1 tool for building, sharing, and running apps—trusted by startups and Fortune 100s alike. We’re growing fast and just getting started.

Come join us for a whale of a ride!

Define the technical architecture for innovative AI agents and tools that accelerate developer productivity, provide observability insights, and automate operational reviews. Lead the design and implementation of tools that make it easier for teams to adopt an AI‑native mindset and accelerate adoption of AI developer tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Warp, or other AI tools as they gain traction within Docker teams.

Design and build the foundational platform infrastructure that empowers product and platform teams across Docker to unblock themselves by rapidly prototyping, building, and deploying their own AI developer tools. Establish technical standards, architectural patterns, and best practices that enable teams to experiment with AI solutions for their unique pain points, iterate quickly on tool ideas, and graduate successful prototypes into production‑ready services.

• Technical Leadership & Architecture – Define the long‑term technical vision and architecture for AI‑powered developer tools and the self‑service platform that enables teams to build their own AI agents.
• Establish architectural patterns, technical standards, and best practices for LLM integration, AI agent development, and production AI systems serving developers.
• Lead technical strategy for platform capabilities including deployment frameworks (ArgoCD/Git Ops), observability integration (Grafana), security controls, and operational tooling for AI developer tools.
• Design highly available, scalable infrastructure for hosting AI agents and developer tools with predictable performance and intelligent resource management.
• Drive technical decisions on AI technology choices, LLM provider strategies, prompt engineering approaches, and agent orchestration frameworks.
• Partner with Senior Manager and product leadership to align technical architecture with business objectives and productization opportunities.

• Systems Design & Implementation – Architect and build production‑ready AI agents for developer productivity including code review assistants, test generators, deployment diagnostics, and incident response automation.
• Design and implement the self‑service platform infrastructure that reduces time‑to‑production for new AI tools from weeks to days.
• Build systems that accelerate adoption of AI‑native development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Warp) across Docker’s engineering organization.
• Establish reliability, security, and performance standards for AI systems including SLOs, monitoring, incident response, and cost management.
• Design integration points between AI developer tools and existing developer infrastructure (CI/CD pipelines, observability platforms, deployment systems).
• Lead technical implementation of AI tools that improve early‑stage development metrics (commits, PRs), deployment pipelines, and incident response while maintaining pipeline stability.

• Strategic Impact & Innovation – Evaluate emerging AI/LLM technologies, developer tooling trends, and agent frameworks to inform Docker’s technical strategy.
• Define technical approach for productizing internal AI developer tools into customer‑facing offerings.
• Drive technical standards for measuring AI tool effectiveness including adoption metrics, productivity gains, and developer satisfaction.
• Optimize AI tool performance, cost efficiency, and developer experience through…