D

Staff Software Engineer Infrastructure

Docker

Fully Remote
πŸ“ Remote - Worldwide
πŸ‡ΏπŸ‡¦ SA Friendly: 0.7/1.0

πŸ‡ΏπŸ‡¦ Hirezar Summary for South African Applicants

This fully remote full time position at Docker is open to applicants from South Africa. As a remote position, you can work from anywhere in South Africa β€” whether you're based in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, or a smaller town.

Job Description

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.

Docker is shipping a wave of new products this year, with R&D initiatives likely to lead to more, and we're investing heavily in the platform underneath all of it. That platform supports hundreds of engineers across many development teams and carries high-scale production traffic and data transfer every day. It has grown faster than its foundations, and this year is about closing that gap.

Today, much of that work still leans on a handful of experts unblocking the same provisioning and operational workflows by hand. The top priority for this role is moving that work from expert-driven support topaved roads: self-service systems with clear ownership, safe defaults, strong guardrails, and adoption we can measure. The goal is a platform teams trust enough to stop thinking about it, one that just works, so they can focus on their own products instead of ours.

The concrete version sits on this year's roadmap: spinning up a new global region or application environment should take hours, not days. Right now it takes days. Getting there means building the foundations underneath it. We need a real multi-region, cross-account network architecture and a testing and continuous-deployment flow teams can trust, then a self-service layer on top.

We're the container company building our own internal platform, so the bar for "the easy path is also the safe path" is high. You'd be joining a team of four, growing to seven this year (this is one of those hires), and we're looking for a Staff engineer to set technical direction and lead it through real production adoption.

Responsibilities

This is a Staff-level role, so success is measured by leverage rather than just your own commits. On a team this size you'll stay hands-on in the codebase while also setting direction, aligning teams on pragmatic standards, and carrying platform investments through to adoption. Concretely, you will:
* Take ambiguous infrastructure problems and turn them into proposals the org can rally around, then drive them through RFCs and architecture reviews across teams.
Take ambiguous infrastructure problems and turn them into proposals the org can rally around, then drive them through RFCs and architecture reviews across teams.
* Design self-service capabilities and platform APIs (primarily inGo) for onboarding, provisioning, deployment, observability defaults, and day-2 operations, with contracts and docs teams actually use.
Design self-service capabilities and platform APIs (primarily inGo) for onboarding, provisioning, deployment, observability defaults, and day-2 operations, with contracts and docs teams actually use.
* Set delivery standards usingTerraform,GitOps with Argo CD, progressive rollout, and good testing, including building the continuous-deployment flow we're missing today.
Set delivery standards usingTerraform,GitOps with Argo CD, progressive rollout, and good testing, including building the continuous-deployment flow we're missing today.
* Evolve the multi-tenantEKSfoundations toward better reliability, security, scale, and cost:Envoy Gatewayingress, traffic routing, and the multi-region, cross-account connectivity we need.
Evolve the multi-tenantEKSfoundations toward better reliability, security, scale, and cost:Envoy Gatewayingress, traffic routing, and the multi-region, cross-account connectivity we need.
* Improve SLOs, alerting, and incident follow-up onGrafana Cloudso production gets safer and less dependent on heroics.
Improve SLOs, alerting, and incident follow-up onGrafana Cloudso production gets safer and less dependent on heroics.

We judge this work by outcomes the consuming teams feel: how fast they can provision and ship, how much they can do without us, and how reliably it all runs.

AI-assisted operations

We're actively investing in AI-assisted and agentic workflows to cut operational toil. We care that they stay safe, auditable, and human-reviewed. You'll help shape where these earn their place and where they don't. Early targets include:
* Alert enrichment and incident context-gathering: assembling the relevant signals, history, and runbook so the on-call engineer starts with context instead of a blank page.
Alert enrichment and incident context-gathering: assembling the relevant signals, history, and runbook so the on-

Tips for South African Applicants

⏰

Timezone Advantage

South Africa (SAST, UTC+2) overlaps well with European business hours and has a few hours of overlap with US East Coast. Mention your timezone flexibility in your application.

πŸ’°

Salary in Context

Even without a listed salary, international remote roles typically pay 2-3x more than equivalent local positions in South Africa due to the exchange rate advantage.

πŸ“‹

Application Tips

Tailor your CV to international standards β€” use a clean format, highlight remote work experience, and include your English proficiency. Many SA applicants succeed by emphasising their strong work ethic and cultural adaptability.

πŸ”Œ

Load Shedding Preparedness

If you're applying for a remote role, having a backup power solution (UPS, inverter, or generator) and mobile data as a backup internet connection shows employers you're prepared for South Africa's infrastructure challenges.

About Docker

Docker is a company in the docker industry that hires remote workers from South Africa.