Senior Software Engineer

Who you are

• The successful candidate is a technical, product-minded engineer with deep experience building secure, isolated runtime environments (sandboxes, containers, or VMs) and a track record of shipping and owning that kind of infrastructure in production at scale
• 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
• They can drive clarity and consensus on hard, ambiguous problems that cross team and component boundaries, raise the bar for engineering quality wherever they work, thrive in a remote-first environment, communicate clearly across time zones, work with our users, while bringing curiosity and craftsmanship to hard problems
• 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

What the job involves

• The Docker Sandboxes team is building the runtime that lets AI coding agents run safely on a developer's machine: disposable, isolated microVM sandboxes that each get their own Docker daemon, filesystem, and network
• This is the core of Docker's sbx product: developers can give an agent the autonomy it needs to get real work done without it ever touching the host, and tear the whole environment down when it's finished
• Please note: this role is currently prioritizing candidates currently located in the Eastern time zone (US or Canada), or in the EU
• Design, develop, and lead improvements to the sandboxes product across agent integration, tool permissions, and developer-facing workflows
• Investigate and resolve correctness, performance, and stability issues in the agent integration layer across macOS, Windows, and Linux
• Drive the reliability and performance of sandbox creation, session management, and teardown for AI agent workloads
• 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

The application process

• First 30 Days
• Build an understanding of our codebase
• Meet the people on your team and those adjacent to it
• Build an understanding of the products we are shipping and our near-term technical priorities
• Deliver small fixes or improvements
• First 90 Days
• Lead the design and development of a significant improvement or feature of the local sandboxes stack
• Engage with our open source project and the relevant upstream communities
• Shape the team's technical direction, and drive architecture discussions
• One Year Outlook (First Year)
• Deliver measurable improvements to the correctness and performance of sandboxes
• Become a recognized technical owner of key parts of the codebase and a go-to technical leader for the local runtime
• Help us define the longer-term technical strategy for the filesystem layer in a way that fits with Product and Business goals, and rally the team behind it

Benefits

• 100% company paid medical premiums for employees and dependents
• Flexible Time Off Policy
• Employer Paid Holidays
• Generous Parental Leave (after 6 months of employment)
• Home Office Set Up Budget
• Monthly Technology Stipend
• Training Allowances
• Life and Disability Insurance
• Retirement Plans
• Virtual and In-Person Social Events
• Docker Swag
• Quarterly Hackathons