Senior Manager, Engineering, Local Runtime (East Coast)

The Runtime team is building Docker's runtime for AI workloads—a cross-platform foundation that delivers strong isolation and enterprise governance at every layer. The team owns a custom VMM, a full container stack, and deep OS integration across Windows, macOS, and Linux. This technology is the core of Docker's new sbx product, which enables AI agents and workloads to run safely and at scale.

In this role, you would manage this team, owning its technical direction and delivery and being accountable for its operational excellence.

The successful candidate is a hands-on systems engineer at heart. They have worked deep in the stack—hypervisors, container runtimes, OS internals, kernel development—and use that experience to guide their team to sound architectural decisions and a high engineering bar. They are skilled at growing and retaining senior individual contributors, thrive in a remote-first environment, and bring the same curiosity and craft to engineering leadership that they once brought to the code itself.

They stay close to customers—not because they're told to, but because they know that the gap between elegant internals and something people actually trust is where the real work happens.

Please note: this role is only open to candidates currently living and working in the East Coast time zone of the US or Canada. We are unable to make an exception to this location requirement - thanks!

- Lead a team of 6–10 engineers building Docker's cross-platform runtime across Windows, macOS, and Linux.

- Partner closely with product management to align the team with business and product goals.

- Ensure predictable delivery and operational excellence across the components the team ships.

- Facilitate communication across teams and provide status reporting for critical projects.

- 5+ years experience managing high-performing engineering teams.

- 5+ years of hands-on systems programming experience (hypervisors, container runtimes, OS internals, kernel development, or similar low-level infrastructure).

- 8+ years of professional, hands-on, full-time software engineering experience in backend, infrastructure, or platform engineering.

- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

- Deep understanding of virtualization concepts: VMMs, hypervisors, and hardware-assisted virtualization.

- Experience with container runtimes (OCI, containerd, runc) or equivalent low-level infrastructure.

- Cross-platform systems experience across two or more of: Windows, macOS, Linux.

- Comfortable with a high degree of autonomy and the ability to work remotely across time zones.

- Meet the team along with peers across the group and the company.

- Gain a high-level understanding of the runtime architecture: the VMM, container stack, and how they fit together across platforms.

- Work with the team to align on goals and measures of success.

- Work with the team to improve processes and remove blockers.

- Contribute technical input to roadmap and architectural decisions.

- Drive the long-term technical direction of the runtime across all supported platforms.

- Have had a sustained, positive impact on the growth and performance of your reports.

- Shipped meaningful improvements to the cross-platform runtime that developers rely on every day.