Staff Software Engineer, Docker Agents (London)

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!

Join Docker's AI engineering team to build the future of containerized AI agents. Docker containers are the perfect vehicle to host and run AI agents - providing isolation, portability, and reproducibility. You'll be working on cagent, our open-source project (https://github.com/docker/cagent), and expanding on it to enable developers to build, deploy, and scale intelligent agents using Docker's container technology. This is a greenfield opportunity to shape how developers leverage containers for AI agents at massive scale. You'll work alongside a team of seasoned engineers, collaborating with our sister teams working on Ask Gordon and Docker's broader AI platform. This is a unique opportunity to combine cutting-edge AI techniques with container technology to solve real-world developer problems.

Please note: this role is only available to candidates currently located in London (or reasonable commuting distance to London). We are unable to make exceptions to this location requirement.

Responsibilities

• As a Staff Engineer, you will partner with the engineering leadership to help set technical direction and serve as a guide and mentor as the team grows and matures.
• Build Containerized Agent Systems: Design and implement systems that leverage Docker containers as the ideal runtime for AI agents, ensuring isolation, scalability, and portability.
• Expand cagent: Maintain and evolve the open-source cagent project, adding new capabilities for containerized agent deployment and orchestration.
• Agent Runtime Development: Build robust infrastructure for packaging, deploying, and managing agents in containers.
• RAG Integration: Enhance agent capabilities with Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems to provide contextual knowledge and domain expertise (secondary focus).
• Evaluation & Testing: Design robust evaluation frameworks to measure agent performance, reliability, and containerized deployment effectiveness.
• Rapid Prototyping: Iterate quickly on new agent capabilities and deployment patterns, moving from concept to production efficiently.
• Open Source Community: Engage with the cagent community, review contributions, and help grow the ecosystem.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Work closely with product managers, designers, and engineers across Docker's AI teams to integrate containerized agent capabilities into Docker's developer experience.
• On-Call Rotation: Take part in on-call rotation for your team; respond to incidents, debug production issues, and drive continuous improvement of system reliability.

Qualifications

• Go Expertise: Strong, demonstrated, professional proficiency in Go (this is absolutely required) - Docker's primary language for backend systems.
• AI/ML Knowledge: Practical experience with large language models (LLMs) and agent development.
• System Architecture: Proven ability to design scalable, distributed systems.
• Container Technology: Deep understanding of Docker, containerization best practices, and container orchestration.
• RAG Systems: Experience building Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems (secondary focus).
• Rapid Iteration: Demonstrated ability to prototype quickly and iterate based on feedback.
• AI Frameworks: Experience with CrewAI, AGNO, ADK, LangChain/LangGraph or similar AI orchestration frameworks (preferred).
• Python Proficiency: Experience with Python for AI prototyping and tooling (preferred).
• Experience with Kubernetes or container orchestration platforms (preferred).
• Open source contributions and community engagement (preferred).
• Experience with agent evaluation, reliability, and observability techniques (preferred).
• 8+ years of directly applicable experience.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

What to expect

• First 30 days: Integrate into our dynamic AI engineering team building containerized agent infrastructure. Deep dive into cagent's architecture and our containerized agent deployment roadmap. Contribute your first enhancements to cagent with the help of your team. Understand our technical stack and begin collaborating with sister AI teams.
• First 90 days: Lead significant features or improvements to cagent and our containerized agent platform. Enhance agent deployment capabilities and container-based orchestration patterns. Collaborate with the open-source community on cagent development. Help other new team members onboard. Regularly interact with internal stakeholders and analyze user feedback.
• One Year Outlook: Drive major architectural decisions for our containerized agent platform that will impact millions of Docker users. Continue to help grow the team and develop efficient agent development processes. Contribute to evaluation frameworks and performance optimization across our agent systems. Lead initiatives to expand containerized agent capabilities for enterprise use cases. Grow your skills in enterprise-grade containerized AI system architecture and deployment. Shape the future direction of cagent and Docker's agent ecosystem.

Docker does not offer visa sponsorship for this role.

Docker embraces diversity and equal opportunity. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. The more inclusive we are, the better our company will be.