Who you are

• You have deep, informed opinions about how developers are changing what it means to build and ship software
• Ou're AI-native in your process: using tooling to move faster, synthesize earlier, and prototype first
• You're passionate about technology and even more passionate about the people that use it
• You tirelessly advocate for the developer and have deep empathy for the friction they hit every day
• You put their needs first, and you have strong opinions, loosely held, about how to serve them better
• The ideal candidate enjoys solving big problems with elegant solutions and has a strong track record of delivering extraordinary experiences for technical users
• You work quickly, think in systems, and understand the difference between a workflow that technically works and one that developers actually trust and return to time and time again
• You have excellent communication skills and a real ability to bring cross-functional teams along with you, from individual engineers and PMs to senior leadership
• You play well with others
• You thrive in a fast-paced, remote-first environment
• You bring a distinct point of view, you elevate the designers around you, and you're just as open to feedback on your own work as you are generous with it for others
• Proven track record influencing product direction and strategy with actionable, research-informed design
• Deep experience designing for developer tools, platforms, or infrastructure products
• Solid understanding of qualitative and quantitative research methods with an ability to synthesize and communicate quickly
• Fluency with prototyping, quick visualizations, and iterative development
• Demonstrated ability to learn new technology domains and develop strong opinions about them
• Excellent project management, communication, and presentation skills
• Experience leading, coaching, or mentoring product designers. We currently have a number of staff designers and senior designers and this role is expected to help level up the team as a whole. You’re not working in a silo, but rather defining design practice at Docker
• Familiarity with container technologies, DevOps tooling, or infrastructure products
• Empathy for developers as end-users; you understand their frustration with bad tooling personally
• Strong opinions, loosely held; you advocate hard and change up gracefully
• Humility and a genuine learning mindset
• Ability to explain complex ideas simply without dumbing them down
• Excellent written, verbal, and visual communication skills
• Reflective, accountable, and ownership-oriented
• AI forward design process: you're meaningfully integrated tooling into your design practice

What the job involves

• As a Principal Product Designer, you distill complex developer workflows into insights that shape design, product, and engineering decisions
• Docker is modernizing how millions of builders experience development. We're looking for a Principal Product Designer who is deeply passionate about bringing human-centered thinking to developer tooling and who is ready to help lead the redesign of our container platform from a place of genuine conviction about where the industry is heading
• Your ideas directly influence Docker's product direction and growth
• Own the end-to-end design for the container platform
• Distill complex developer workflows into elegant, opinionated solutions
• Collaborate and iterate with a cross-functional team of designers, product managers, and engineers
• Use AI tools actively throughout the design process for prototyping, synthesis, and iteration
• Work across stakeholders to build consensus on a shared product vision
• Constructively challenge existing approaches and push for better solutions
• Mentor and coach members of the product design team
• Partner with senior leadership to design strategy
• First 30 Days:
• Complete onboarding and ramp up on Docker Desktop, the CLI, and container platform systems. Go beyond surface level and understand how the pieces connect
• Audit all existing design work across the container platform: what has been tried, what shipped, what didn't, and why
• Shadow customer calls to start building a ground-level view of how people actually use the platform and where the friction lives
• By week 3, be sharing work and early thinking with the team. Not polished, just visible
• By the end of month one, have a working directional point of view on where the container platform needs to go
• First 60 Days:
• Build active relationships across engineering, product, sales, and support leadership
• Be actively designing and shipping work. Show up in critiques and stay in the flow with engineering and PM partners
• Establish your agentic workflow scaffolding: define how you are using AI tooling for prototyping, synthesis, and iteration, and get in sync with how the broader design team is working
• Crystallize a design-led point of view on where the container platform is headed and share it with your manager and team
• One-Year Outlook:
• Fully own the design of the container platform end to end across workflows, visual quality, and system coherence, with demonstrable improvement from where things were on day one
• Act as a genuine strategic thought partner to senior leadership on the container platform and Docker's broader direction
• Feed insight and craft back to the rest of the design team, especially admin and bridge-side designers. Show what principal-level work looks like in motion, not in a job description
• By year one the container platform should feel unmistakably better in workflow clarity, visual craft, and developer trust, and that should be traceable to your presence on the team

Benefits

• 100% company paid medical premiums for employees and dependents
• Flexible Time Off Policy
• “Whaleness” Days — At least 1 company wide day off per month
• Employer Paid Holidays
• Generous Maternity and Parental Leave
• Home Office Set Up Budget
• Monthly Technology Stipend
• Training Allowances
• Life and Disability Insurance
• Retirement Plans
• Virtual and In-Person Social Events
• Docker Swag
• Quarterly Hackathons
• Virtual Coffee with Co-Workers