{"id":499,"url":"https://alion.io/job/docker-principal-software-engineer-docker-hardened-images","title":"Principal Software Engineer, Docker Hardened Images","company":{"id":569,"name":"Docker","domain":"docker.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/docker","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":79,"open_postings":8,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.625,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":60,"computed_at":"2026-11-06T05:58:05Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"inferred","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["CA","US"],"hiring_countries_total":2,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":133000,"max_usd":260000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":16},"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"cert-manager","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"FedRAMP","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Grafana","optional":false},{"name":"Helm","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Kyverno","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"SBOM","optional":false},{"name":"Sigstore","optional":false},{"name":"SLSA","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-06-23T16:53:51Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-26","last_verified_at":"2026-11-06T11:13:44Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":135,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":1,"flags":[],"days_open":135},"description":"About Docker\nDocker 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.\nWe 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.\n_______________________________________________________________________\nDocker Hardened Images (DHI) is Docker's catalogue of security-hardened, enterprise-grade container images and Helm charts, built to be minimal, up-to-date, and safe to deploy in regulated and security-conscious environments. We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to set the long-term technical direction for this catalogue and shape how the broader container security ecosystem evolves inside and beyond Docker.\nAt this level, you'll work across organizations, not just within one team. You'll set direction for major domains, resolve the highest-ambiguity problems in container supply chain security, and grow your impact through architectural leadership, cross-functional alignment, and influence on industry standards. This is a pure individual contributor role; influence comes through technical vision, design, and the ability to move organizations.\nResponsibilities\nOwn the architecture for DHI as a platform, making high-leverage decisions that define how images and Helm charts are authored, secured, distributed, and evolved across the entire catalogue and across Docker's broader product surface.\n\nDefine and drive multi-quarter technical roadmaps for the container hardening domain, balancing upstream velocity, supply chain security posture, customer compliance requirements, and long-term catalogue scalability.\n\nIdentify systemic patterns from customer, operational, and upstream signals and translate them into architectural changes that span the catalogue, not just individual images or charts.\n\nBuild alignment across teams and executives on technical strategy, tradeoffs, and sequencing, including product, security, infrastructure, and customer-facing functions.\n\nRepresent Docker as a trusted technical voice in escalations, key enterprise customer engagements, and upstream OSS communities on issues that shape the future of secure container delivery.\n\nSet conventions and standards at scale, defining the patterns others build within for image definition, Helm chart adaptation, hardening strategy, and supply chain tooling (Sigstore, SBOM, SLSA), and evolving those standards as the ecosystem changes.\n\nDrive the hardest, most ambiguous packaging problems where the right answer requires reasoning across upstream dynamics, security tradeoffs, multi-arch constraints, and customer impact simultaneously.\n\nShape the integration test infrastructure and developer tooling strategy so that DHI's engineering platform scales with the catalogue and raises quality across the team.\n\nMentor and raise the technical ceiling for staff and senior engineers across the org, through review, design, and well-chosen architectural decisions that create durable leverage.\n\nTake part in the paid on-call rotation; respond to incidents, debug production issues, and drive systemic improvements in reliability.\n\nQualifications\n10+ years of backend engineering experience, including extensive work on production-grade, distributed systems at scale.\n\nBachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.\n\nAbility to set multi-quarter technical roadmaps and align stakeholders (engineering, product, and executives) on strategy and tradeoffs.\n\nDeep expertise in the container and Kubernetes ecosystem: you have strong, grounded opinions about cert-manager, kyverno, grafana, istio, and similar projects, and you can reason about tradeoffs at the ecosystem level, not just the image level.\n\nMastery of container supply chain security concepts (provenance, attestation, SBOM, signing, SLSA) and experience driving posture decisions across an organization rather than implementing them on a single project.\n\nStrong software engineering fundamentals: code review, testing, source control, CI/CD, and Go sufficient to shape infrastructure and harness design.\n\nTrack record of technical influence without authority across multiple teams or organizations, raising quality through design docs, standards, review, and mentorship.\n\nExperience navigating upstream OSS communities as a decision-maker, representing a downstream organization's requirements and shaping upstream direction on security-relevant issues.\n\nComfort working across remote, distributed teams and communicating complex technical strategy clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.\n\nBonus but not required\nExperience as a package maintainer at a Linux distribution, Homebrew, or comparable ecosystem.\n\nHands-on experience implementing or operationalizing supply chain tooling (Sigstore, SBOM, SLSA) at org scale.\n\nExperience in regulated environments (FedRAMP, FIPS, PCI) with direct exposure to compliance requirements shaping engineering decisions.\n\nPrior Principal or Distinguished IC experience on a platform, security, or developer-tools team.\n\nExperience engaging directly with enterprise customers on container security architecture.\n\nWhat to Expect\nFirst 30 Days\nAlign with leadership on the most critical org-wide technical risks and opportunities in container supply chain security.\n\nDevelop a point of view on DHI's current architectural constraints and where the highest-leverage interventions are.\n\nBegin mapping the cross-functional landscape: product priorities, upstream pressures, customer compliance signals, and engineering gaps.\n\nFirst 90 Days\nDrive an architectural decision that unblocks multiple teams and reduces systemic risk across the catalogue.\n\nEstablish a feedback loop from customer, operational, and upstream signals into the multi-quarter roadmap.\n\nEngage upstream OSS communities on at least one DHI-relevant issue with meaningful influence on direction.\n\nFirst Year\nDeliver a major platform or standards evolution with broad adoption across DHI and adjacent teams.\n\nCreate durable alignment across engineering, product, and security on catalogue architecture, supply chain posture, and hardening strategy.\n\nRaise the technical ceiling for the engineers around you, measurably improving review quality, architectural consistency, and the team's ability to operate independently at a higher level.\n\nDocker considers visa sponsorship on a case-by-case basis based on business needs.\nCompensation & Equity\nCanada: CA$245,913 - CA$397,139 + equity\nUnited States: $180,500 - $291,500 + equity\n______________________________________________________________________\nPosting Information\nOpen vacancy: This posting is for an existing open role.\n\nAI in hiring: Docker may use AI-assisted tools during our recruiting process.\n\nInterview 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.\n\n______________________________________________________________________\nPerks & Benefits\nRemote-first by design - Work from your home, with offices in Seattle and Paris for connection and collaboration.\n\nFlexibility that fits your life - We trust you to manage your schedule while delivering great work.\n\nTime to recharge - Generous PTO, designated quarterly Whaleness Days, and a designated end-of-year Whaleness break.\n\nHome office support - Set up your workspace for comfort and success.\n\nTechnology stipend - Equivalent to US$100 net per month to help support your work.\n\nLearning & development - Annual stipend for conferences, courses, certifications, and continued learning.\n\nParental leave - 16 weeks of paid parental leave after six months of employment.\n\nEquity for all full-time employees - Share in Docker's long-term success as we continue to grow.\n\nComprehensive benefits - Medical, retirement, and paid holidays vary by country.\n\nDocker swag - Because representing the whale never gets old.\n\nDocker 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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":8756,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":10,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Home office","Parental leave"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Canada","iso":"CA","kind":"country"},{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["DevOps & Platform Engineering","Virtualization & Containers","Developer Tools"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-06-23T16:53:51Z"},{"event":"close","at":"2026-09-30T22:47:21Z"},{"event":"reopen","at":"2026-10-27T00:42:29Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":21,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.74,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":135,"expected_fill_days":60,"reasons":["conf:3","velocity","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-11-06T05:58:05Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/docker-principal-software-engineer-docker-hardened-images","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/docker-principal-software-engineer-docker-hardened-images.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-06T11:54:23Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":21715,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-07T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":569},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=569"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fdocker-principal-software-engineer-docker-hardened-images"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fdocker-principal-software-engineer-docker-hardened-images"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fdocker-principal-software-engineer-docker-hardened-images"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/docker-principal-software-engineer-docker-hardened-images\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fdocker-principal-software-engineer-docker-hardened-images"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":499}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"docker.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":499},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. Docs: https://alion.io/developers"}}