Skip to content
Docker

Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

San Francisco, CA; San Jose, CA; Seattle, WARemote · United States
Principal · FullTime · Engineering
POSTED 22 OCTVERIFIED 1D AGO
Apply Ask
Role
22 days opentrue age
Closes in ~29d at the median (51d)
Posted 22 Oct · n=10
Pay
$225k–$320kno pay posted
$212k$320k
Market p25–p75
$225k–$320k
H-1B median · Software engineering
$212k
SF Bay Area · n=211 · 365d to 12 Nov
CompanyDocker →
54open roles
Opened · 30d
+7
Closed · 30d
−8
12d of snapshots · 30d window
Market
2,585open · Principal Software engineering
Opened · 7d
+26810% of open
All software engineering
74,737open
All tracked boards · live 14 Nov · n=2,585
Visa
5H-1B LCAs · FY26
Median wage
$212k
LCAs FY26 · n=5 · to 2026-06-18
KubernetesDocker

About Docker

Docker 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.

We 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.

_______________________________________________________________________

The Role

Docker Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE) embed directly with our most strategic customers to solve important, complex technical problems and turn ambitious ideas into production outcomes. FDEs take on the most challenging technical challenges using existing Docker products and patterns when possible, and work across customer, Docker Product and Engineering teams to realize new approaches when required.

As a Docker FDE, you will work side-by-side with customer engineering teams to deeply understand their goals, problems, constraints, and technical landscape; identify the highest-leverage opportunities; and design, build, and ship solutions with them. You own the technical journey from discovery and architecture through prototyping, implementation and production rollout.

The solutions you build may use existing Docker products, extend Docker into new environments, integrate deeply with customer and third-party systems, or reveal capabilities that Docker should build next. You work closely with Docker Solutions Architects to evolve existing patterns, and Docker Product and Engineering to turn new learnings into reusable patterns and product capabilities.

_______________________________________________________________________

Responsibilities

Build in Production with Customers

Embed with customer engineering teams to design, build, and ship solutions from first prototype through stable production rollout. Use existing Docker products and patterns when possible, invent, prototype and validate innovative solutions when necessary.

Deliver working technical artifacts to customers: custom MCP servers with tightly integrated Docker Sandbox environments for coding agents and containerized agents; Docker Compose definitions for multi-agent harnesses and model-backed applications; Hardened Image standardization and migration; New tools that unblock customer progress.

Integrate Docker's AI platform with the customer's existing stack, including identity providers (OIDC/SAML/SSO), secrets management, private and air-gapped registries, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and observability tooling.

Own technical delivery on your engagements: scope the work, sequence it, make trade-offs between speed and quality, remove blockers early, and contribute directly to code whenever progress depends on it.

Make AI Adoption Safe and Governable

Translate customer security, compliance, and platform requirements into concrete plans and see those plans through from ideation to production.

Help customers define controls to enable them to adopt agentic AI to solve their unique business problems without compromising security, compliance, data sovereignty or end-user experience.

Establish quality and performance standards for customers and work closely with Docker Product and Engineering to quickly address issues that fall outside of established thresholds

Partner with customer security and platform teams to get agentic workloads through architecture review, threat modeling, and change control.

Partner with Solutions Architecture and the Field

Work closely with Solutions Architects to enable off-the-self solutions when possible and provide technical experience and leadership when a bespoke solution is necessary.

Source · DockerFirst seen 2 Nov1 editsOriginal ↗