# Staff Software Engineer, Agentic Platform

**Company:** [Docker](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/docker)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $170k – $276k/yr
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** AWS, Oci, Go, Python, Rust, Java, Terraform, Helm, Postgres, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes
**Posted:** 2026-05-28

> As a Staff Software Engineer on the Agentic Platform team, you will build foundational infrastructure for AI-driven workflows, focusing on agent execution runtime, orchestration, and cloud infrastructure. This role involves high ownership, driving architectural decisions, and mentoring junior engineers.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities/What you'll work on:

### Agent Workflow & Orchestration

* Design and operate the core agent execution runtime responsible for scheduling, state management, and lifecycle management of long-running agentic workflows
* Build robust multi-agent coordination patterns: task handoff, agent memory (short-term and long-term), tool use, and workflow branching at scale
* Develop context window management strategies and session persistence layers for stateful agent interactions
* Build tooling for prompt engineering as a first-class engineering discipline — versioning, testing, and evaluation of prompts at scale
* Build platform capabilities that support developers working in AI-assisted coding workflows, including IDE integrations, local-first development environments, and fast iteration loops

### Cloud Infrastructure & Service Ownership

* Own and operate Agentic Platform services in AWS or OCI infrastructure provisioning, scaling, cost management, and reliability
* Provision and manage cloud infrastructure using Terraform; manage Kubernetes application packaging and deployment with Helm
* Participate in the 24/7 on-call rotation This role may require participation in a 24/7 on-call rotation for the Agentic Platform; carry genuine pager responsibility for the services you build and operate
* Define and uphold SLOs; lead incident response, blameless post-mortems, and drive continuous reliability improvements
* Instrument systems for observability: distributed tracing, structured logging, metrics dashboards, and alerting

### Technical Leadership

* As a Staff Engineer, partner with engineering leadership to set technical direction and serve as a guide and mentor as the team grows
* Drive architectural decisions that balance velocity with long-term maintainability across a distributed, cloud-native stack
* Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, designers, and partner engineering teams to integrate agentic capabilities into the broader developer platform
* Contribute to a culture of engineering excellence through design reviews, RFC processes, and mentorship

## Qualifications for this role

### Required:

* **8+ years** of professional, hands-on, full-time software engineering experience in backend, infrastructure, or platform engineering.
* **Cloud Platform Expertise (AWS/OCI/Azure/GCP):** Proven, hands-on experience operating production services in AWS or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure compute, networking, managed services, IAM, and cost management. This is a must-have; the Agentic Platform is a cloud-native service running 24/7.
* **Service Ownership in a Cloud Setting:** You have owned production services end-to-end — on-call, incident response, SLO definition, and post-mortems. You don't just build; you run what you build.
* **Distributed Systems Design:** Deep understanding of fault tolerance, consistency, observability, and scalability in cloud-native environments
* **Backend Engineering Proficiency:** Strong proficiency in at least one backend language used for systems work — Go, Python, Rust, or Java
* Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

### Strongly Preferred:

* **Go:** Professional proficiency in Go — Docker's primary language for backend systems
* **Infrastructure as Code:** Experience with Terraform for cloud infrastructure provisioning and Helm for Kubernetes application packaging and deployment
* **Data Infrastructure:** Experience with PostgreSQL and Redis / Pub-Sub patterns for state management, caching, and event-driven agent workflows
* **MCP & Agent Tooling:** Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol) server design and integration
* **Container & Orchestration:** Docker, Kubernetes, or equivalent — especially in the context of agent sandboxing and secure code execution environments
* **AI-assisted development tools:** Familiarity with Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, Windsurf, etc. and the developer personas using them
* **Agent Evaluation:** Experience with LLM-as-judge frameworks, behavioral regression testing, and golden dataset management
* **Agent Systems Experience:** Hands-on experience building or operating AI agent systems — including multi-agent orchestration, tool use, memory systems, or agent evaluation frameworks
* **Open Source:** Contributions or community engagement on relevant open source projects

## Perks

* Freedom & flexibility; fit your work around your life
* Designated quarterly Whaleness Days plus end of year Whaleness break
* Home office setup; we want you comfortable while you work
* 16 weeks of paid Parental leave (after 6 months of employment)
* Technology stipend equivalent to $100 USD net/month
* PTO plan that encourages you to take time to do the things you enjoy
* Equity; we are a growing start-up and want all employees to have a share in the success of the company
* Docker Swag
* Medical benefits, retirement and holidays vary by country
* Remote-first culture, with offices in Seattle and Paris

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