Staff Software Engineer, AI Gateway

Overview

Staff Software Engineer on the Docker AI Gateway team, setting technical direction for the model router, MCP gateway and control plane that power AI agent applications.

What you'll do

• Set technical direction for core systems powering the AI Gateway, including the model router, MCP gateway, and control plane, and make sure architectural decisions hold up as usage scales by 10x
• Consistently identify gaps in infrastructure, process, or tooling before they become blockers, and drive the fix from idea to production
• Take a significant, hands-on role in defining, delivering, and implementing the Gateway's technical strategy, in close partnership with engineering leadership
• Own the hardest, highest-ambiguity problems in the system: dynamic model selection, auto-failover, cost-based routing, and policy enforcement that has to work end-to-end
• Act as the go-to expert for secure credential storage, session summarization, caching, and rate limiting
• Build the infrastructure that lets us, and our customers, evaluate, replay, and backtest agent and LLM behavior with confidence
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, and raise the technical bar for the team through code, design review, and example
• Partner with product, design, and leadership to shape the control plane UI and where the product goes next
• Define the unified abstraction layer across diverse model and tool providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, AWS Bedrock)
• Architect secure, scalable identity and credential vaulting for tool and model access at enterprise scale
• Build infrastructure for real-time and historical analytics of AI agent behavior
• Guarantee that policy enforcement and logging work end-to-end, from prompt to tool to response, with no gaps
• Set the bar for developer experience through intuitive APIs and first-class observability

What you'll need

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience, with a track record of owning production-grade systems at significant scale
• Deep specialization in distributed systems, cloud-native infrastructure, and API design, recognized by peers and cross-functional partners as a go-to expert
• Experience building secure, high-throughput services (gateways, proxies, load balancers, policy engines) and a history of making judgment calls other engineers rely on
• Fluency in Go and/or Rust
• A track record of identifying systemic gaps in architecture, process, or tooling and driving the fix across team boundaries
• A strong product mindset, with real experience shaping technical direction rather than only executing against it
• Comfortable operating with wide latitude, given a problem and significant autonomy in how to solve it, including when and who to pull in
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

Nice to have

• Prior experience with OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar LLM APIs
• Familiarity with RAG architectures, vector databases, or agent frameworks (e.g., LangChain, AutoGPT, CrewAI)
• Experience with policy engines (e.g., OPA), observability frameworks (e.g., OpenTelemetry), or API gateways
• Understanding of OAuth 2.1, secret management, and cloud IAM systems
• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and microservices architecture
• A track record of setting technical standards that other teams or engineers went on to adopt

Details

• Location: San Francisco, CA or Seattle, WA
• Remote-first role; work from home with offices in Seattle and Paris available for collaboration
• Docker considers sponsorship on a case-by-case basis based on business needs