Staff Software Engineer, Docker Agents

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 (), 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.

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 (peferred)
• Python Proficiency: Experience with Python for AI prototyping and tooling (prefered)
• 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