Manager, Engineering, Secure Build and SCS Services (East Coast Preferred)

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. _______________________________________________________________________ Secure Build builds and operates the infrastructure behind Docker's container builds. The team owns Docker Build Cloud and Docker Hub Automated Builds while developing the next generation of trusted build and CI capabilities. Its direction is to make Docker the trusted place CI runs: isolated execution, brokered access to secrets and networks, and verifiable evidence of what each build or test job did. The work spans Go services, container and build technology, cloud infrastructure, sandboxing and software supply-chain security, alongside the operational responsibility for production systems customers already depend on. SCS Services builds the backend systems and product capabilities that help developers understand, secure and ship software with confidence. The team powers important parts of Docker Scout and Docker Hardened Images, including the services and workflows that turn supply-chain data into useful developer, customer and agent experiences. Its estate is deliberately polyglot, with Clojure and Go services, event-driven workflows, Kafka, legacy Datomic components and newer Spanner-backed services. It also supports the customer journey around discovering, assessing, subscribing to and managing hardened artefacts. We are looking for one Engineering Manager to lead both teams. Together they sit at the centre of Docker's secure software supply-chain work: one creates trusted build outcomes, while the other turns build, artifact and dependency data into services and experiences used across Scout and Docker Hardened Images. This is a two-team leadership role with separate roadmaps, production responsibilities and technical domains. The teams should deliver independently, with explicit contracts and joined-up ownership where their services connect. You will own the health, delivery and growth of both teams and make the trade-offs that keep them effective as a portfolio. You will not be expected to be the deepest expert in every language or domain. You will need enough technical breadth and current engineering judgement to engage credibly in designs, reviews and incidents across both teams, set direction with strong senior engineers, and recognise when the right answer is to create space for their expertise. THE KIND OF PERSON WE'RE LOOKING FOR The successful candidate leads first. They are an experienced engineering manager who can inherit two capable teams, earn trust quickly and help each become a high-performing, value-delivering part of the wider Docker organisation. They are deliberate about where they spend their attention, protect both teams from becoming the second priority, and make portfolio trade-offs visible rather than allowing urgency, proximity or the loudest stakeholder to decide. They stay close to the technical work without trying to own every technical decision. They can hold a substantive conversation about distributed backend systems, event and data pipelines, build and CI infrastructure, trust boundaries and production operations. They are active in design and review, useful during incidents and willing to get hands-on where that moves the work forward. The balance still tilts strongly to leadership, coaching, delivery and organisational judgement. They care about security as a product and engineering property, not only as compliance. They understand how modern attacks exploit identity, secrets, dependencies and build systems, and they can reason about the evidence customers need to trust an artefact or workflow. They lead through judgement, clarity and unblocking rather than ceremony for its own sake. Above all, they grow the engineers around them and help both teams ship outcomes developers and enterprises can rely on. RESPONSIBILITIES: - Lead Secure Build and SCS Services, owning delivery, team health, growth, performance and operational excellence across both. - Turn two changing roadmaps into a coherent portfolio plan with explicit priorities, capacity and trade-offs, and create leadership coverage so neither team becomes the permanent second priority. - Partner with Product to shape strategy and roadmaps for secure build, Docker Scout, Docker Hardened Images and the services that connect them. - Stay close to the technical work through design and code review, incident response and selective hands-on contribution where it adds leverage. - Ensure each team's technical direction supports product, security, reliability and customer priorities, setting it collaboratively with Staff and senior engineers while leaving clear decision ownership with them. - Own the interfaces between the teams, including trust boundaries, contracts, data quality, versioning, operational ownership and customer-facing failure modes. - Balance new product work with inherited systems and on-call, and invest in reliability improvements driven by recurring operational pain. - Own engineer growth and performance, handle difficult conversations directly, hire and retain strong people and build succession depth within both teams. - Align Product, Design, Security, DHI Content, Registry, Hub, sales, support, commercial and legal partners while shielding the teams from churn. - Lead disciplined use of AI-assisted engineering and communicate decisions, risks and progress clearly across UK and US working hours. QUALIFICATIONS - Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience - 5+ years managing high-performing engineering teams, with meaningful responsibility across more than one team or distinct technical domain. - 8+ years of professional, hands-on software engineering experience in backend, infrastructure, platform or developer tooling. - Experience leading, growing and retaining engineers at or above your own technical seniority, including teams you did not build and difficult performance conversations. - A leader-first operating model, with current enough technical judgement to participate in design and review across unfamiliar systems without needing to be the best engineer in the room. - Experience prioritising across competing roadmaps, operational load and stakeholder commitments, with clear mechanisms for allocating attention and capacity. - Strong backend and distributed-systems judgement, including APIs, event-driven architectures, data stores, cloud-native infrastructure and production operations. - Understanding of CI or build-system internals, containers and artefact workflows, plus a strong interest in software supply-chain security and trust boundaries. - Experience leading teams that operate production infrastructure through on-call, incident response, observability, SLOs and the work required to reduce recurring operational load. - Strong product judgement and evidence of shaping roadmaps with Product rather than only receiving requirements. - Clear written and verbal communication, strong cross-functional influence, customer closeness and comfort leading a remote-first organisation across European and US time zones. Helpful, but Not Required - Experience with Go, Clojure or both, and evidence of becoming effective across a polyglot estate. - Experience with Kafka, Spanner, Datomic or comparable event-streaming and distributed-data systems. - Experience with OCI, BuildKit, Buildx, GitHub Actions or comparable build and CI platforms. - Experience with sandboxing, microVMs, untrusted workload execution or multi-tenant infrastructure. - Experience with SLSA, in-toto, SBOMs, VEX, Sigstore, cosign, provenance, signing or vulnerability scanning. - Experience evolving legacy systems while shipping new capability for developer tools, security products, regulated customers or software-agent workflows. WHAT TO EXPECT FIRST 30 DAYS - Build relationships with every engineer and the Product partners for both teams before changing structure, process or roadmap. - Understand Secure Build's product direction, production estate and on-call load, including Docker Build Cloud and Docker Hub Automated Builds. - Understand the SCS Services products, customers, architecture and operational profile, and map the dependencies, trust boundaries and ownership lines between the teams. FIRST 90 DAYS. - Own a coherent portfolio plan with both teams and Product, including explicit capacity for roadmap, reliability and cross-team work. - Establish a sustainable operating cadence and leadership coverage that prevents either team depending on your constant presence. - Agree ownership and escalation paths for shared services and failures, start one material improvement in each team and make progress and risk visible. ONE YEAR OUTLOOK - Both teams deliver predictably against a portfolio that connects secure build, Scout and Docker Hardened Images outcomes without collapsing their distinct missions. - Secure Build has delivered material trusted-build or secure-CI capability and reduced operational risk in its inherited production systems. - SCS Services has delivered material customer outcomes, while both teams have sustainable on-call, clearer ownership and senior engineers leading broader work. Docker considers visa sponsorship on a case-by-case basis based on business needs. Compensation & Equity Canada: CA$244,550 – CA$392,150 + equity United States: $174,900 – $282,700 + equity ______________________________________________________________________ POSTING INFORMATION - Open vacancy: This posting is for an existing open role. - AI in hiring: Docker may use AI-assisted tools during our recruiting process. - Interview recordings: Candidates will be invited to opt in to interview recordings to support interviewer calibration and consistent evaluations. Recordings are optional and require explicit consent. ______________________________________________________________________ PERKS & BENEFITS - Remote-first by design – Work from your home, with offices in Seattle and Paris for connection and collaboration. - Flexibility that fits your life – We trust you to manage your schedule while delivering great work. - Time to recharge – Generous PTO, designated quarterly Whaleness Days, and a designated end-of-year Whaleness break. - Home office support – Set up your workspace for comfort and success. - Technology stipend – Equivalent to US$100 net per month to help support your work. - Learning & development – Annual stipend for conferences, courses, certifications, and continued learning. - Parental leave – 16 weeks of paid parental leave after six months of employment. - Equity for all full-time employees – Share in Docker's long-term success as we continue to grow. - Comprehensive benefits – Medical, retirement, and paid holidays vary by country. - Docker swag – Because representing the whale never gets old. Docker is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a team that reflects a broad range of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. We believe diverse teams build better products, make better decisions, and better serve our global community. #LI-REMOTE