Principal Software Engineer (Docker Hardened Images)

Docker, a leading platform for developers and teams to build, share, and run applications. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will set the long-term technical direction for Docker's catalogue of security-hardened container images and Helm charts. You will work across organizations, resolve high-ambiguity problems in container supply chain security, and grow your impact through architectural leadership and influence on industry standards.

Responsibilities

• This is a pure individual contributor role, and you will own the architecture for the Docker Hardened Images platform, define multi-quarter technical roadmaps, and mentor and raise the technical ceiling for staff and senior engineers across the organization.
• Define 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.
• Own 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.
• Build alignment across teams and executives on technical strategy, tradeoffs, and sequencing, including product, security, infrastructure, and customer-facing functions.
• Deep 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
• Track record of technical influence without authority across multiple teams or organizations, raising quality through design docs, standards, review, and mentorship
• Ability to set multi-quarter technical roadmaps and align stakeholders (engineering, product, and executives) on strategy and tradeoffs
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: code review, testing, source control, CI/CD, and Go sufficient to shape infrastructure and harness design
• Comfort working across remote, distributed teams and communicating complex technical strategy clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences

Requirements

• Mastery 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
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 10+ years of backend engineering experience, including extensive work on production-grade, distributed systems at scale
• Experience navigating upstream OSS communities as a decision-maker, representing a downstream organization's requirements and shaping upstream direction on security-relevant issues
• Experience engaging directly with enterprise customers on container security architecture

Preferred

• Prior Principal or Distinguished IC experience on a platform, security, or developer-tools team
• Experience in regulated environments (FedRAMP, FIPS, PCI) with direct exposure to compliance requirements shaping engineering decisions
• Hands-on experience implementing or operationalizing supply chain tooling (Sigstore, SBOM, SLSA) at org scale
• Experience as a package maintainer at a Linux distribution, Homebrew, or comparable ecosystem

Pay

USD 180,500 - 397,139