Software Engineer AI Visa Sponsorship Jobs in Washington
Washington state is one of the strongest markets for software engineer AI visa sponsorship jobs in the U.S. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google maintain major AI research and engineering hubs in the Seattle-Redmond corridor, alongside fast-growing startups in Bellevue and Kirkland. International candidates with machine learning, LLM, or applied AI backgrounds will find concentrated sponsorship activity here.
Find Software Engineer AI JobsOverview
Showing 5 of 838+ Software Engineer AI Jobs in Washington with Visa Sponsorship
See all 838+ Software Engineer AI Jobs in Washington with Visa Sponsorship
Sign up for free to unlock all listings, filter by visa type, and get alerts for new Software Engineer AI Jobs in Washington with Visa Sponsorship.
Get Access To All JobsAbout 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.
Docker’s AI Tools & Security team is building the foundation for the next generation of secure, developer-friendly AI infrastructure. Our flagship product, the MCP Gateway, empowers developers to connect, observe, and secure AI agents and tools across the entire lifecycle—from prototype to production. We’re defining how developers safely harness the power of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) in real-world environments. We’re looking for a Principal Backend Engineer who thrives at the intersection of AI, security, and developer experience. You’ll lead the technical direction of the Gateway and related services, collaborating closely with Product, Design, and Security to deliver elegant frameworks and APIs that developers love to use. This is a high-velocity, high-ownership environment: you’ll ship fast, iterate constantly, and help shape the future of secure agent-based development.
Responsibilities
- Define the technical solution for a new product
- Help shape the product with peers in Product and Design
- Mentor other technical team members
- Be the technical point of contact for the team
- This role may require participation in an on-call rotation to provide support outside of standard business hours, including evenings, weekends, and holidays, as needed.
Qualifications
Required:
- 10+ years of backend engineering experience, including extensive work on production-grade, distributed systems at scale.
- Technical leadership across multiple teams or domains, with a proven ability to drive architectural vision, set technical direction, and influence long-term product strategy.
- Exceptional product and platform mindset—you think beyond implementation details to how technology shapes developer and business outcomes.
- Expertise in designing and evolving large-scale, cloud-native systems, with deep knowledge of distributed computing, service-oriented architecture, and performance optimization.
- Demonstrated experience building secure, resilient, and high-throughput backend services, with a strong grasp of reliability engineering principles (SLOs, observability, incident response).
- Fluency in Go (preferred) or another modern systems language (Rust, Java, C++, etc.), with the ability to lead technical design reviews and mentor others in language-specific best practices.
- Strong grasp of software engineering fundamentals—CI/CD, testing strategy, source control, and deployment automation—applied in complex, multi-service environments.
- Proven track record of technical mentorship and cross-functional collaboration, enabling teams to deliver high-impact, high-quality software efficiently.
- Deep experience with major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and infrastructure-as-code tooling.
- Ownership mentality with a bias for action and iterative delivery, balancing short-term impact with long-term architectural health.
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Comfortable operating autonomously in distributed, remote-first teams, and leading through influence rather than authority.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Bonus
- Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and microservices architecture
- Prior experience with OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar LLM APIs, and the MCP specification
What To Expect
First 30 days:
- Meet team members
- Build context about the problem space and prior art
- Provide feedback on current exploration and propose next steps in line with Product and Design
First 90 Days
- Work with Product and Design on defining the product
- Attend customer calls
- Meet people across the company
- Help grow the team by participating in hiring loops
One Year Outlook (First Year)
- Bring the product to market
Docker considers visa sponsorship on a case-by-case basis based on business needs.
Compensation & Equity
United States: $198K – $319K + 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.
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.
Docker’s AI Tools & Security team is building the foundation for the next generation of secure, developer-friendly AI infrastructure. Our flagship product, the MCP Gateway, empowers developers to connect, observe, and secure AI agents and tools across the entire lifecycle—from prototype to production. We’re defining how developers safely harness the power of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) in real-world environments. We’re looking for a Principal Backend Engineer who thrives at the intersection of AI, security, and developer experience. You’ll lead the technical direction of the Gateway and related services, collaborating closely with Product, Design, and Security to deliver elegant frameworks and APIs that developers love to use. This is a high-velocity, high-ownership environment: you’ll ship fast, iterate constantly, and help shape the future of secure agent-based development.
Responsibilities
- Define the technical solution for a new product
- Help shape the product with peers in Product and Design
- Mentor other technical team members
- Be the technical point of contact for the team
- This role may require participation in an on-call rotation to provide support outside of standard business hours, including evenings, weekends, and holidays, as needed.
Qualifications
Required:
- 10+ years of backend engineering experience, including extensive work on production-grade, distributed systems at scale.
- Technical leadership across multiple teams or domains, with a proven ability to drive architectural vision, set technical direction, and influence long-term product strategy.
- Exceptional product and platform mindset—you think beyond implementation details to how technology shapes developer and business outcomes.
- Expertise in designing and evolving large-scale, cloud-native systems, with deep knowledge of distributed computing, service-oriented architecture, and performance optimization.
- Demonstrated experience building secure, resilient, and high-throughput backend services, with a strong grasp of reliability engineering principles (SLOs, observability, incident response).
- Fluency in Go (preferred) or another modern systems language (Rust, Java, C++, etc.), with the ability to lead technical design reviews and mentor others in language-specific best practices.
- Strong grasp of software engineering fundamentals—CI/CD, testing strategy, source control, and deployment automation—applied in complex, multi-service environments.
- Proven track record of technical mentorship and cross-functional collaboration, enabling teams to deliver high-impact, high-quality software efficiently.
- Deep experience with major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and infrastructure-as-code tooling.
- Ownership mentality with a bias for action and iterative delivery, balancing short-term impact with long-term architectural health.
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Comfortable operating autonomously in distributed, remote-first teams, and leading through influence rather than authority.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Bonus
- Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and microservices architecture
- Prior experience with OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar LLM APIs, and the MCP specification
What To Expect
First 30 days:
- Meet team members
- Build context about the problem space and prior art
- Provide feedback on current exploration and propose next steps in line with Product and Design
First 90 Days
- Work with Product and Design on defining the product
- Attend customer calls
- Meet people across the company
- Help grow the team by participating in hiring loops
One Year Outlook (First Year)
- Bring the product to market
Docker considers visa sponsorship on a case-by-case basis based on business needs.
Compensation & Equity
United States: $198K – $319K + 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.
Software Engineer AI Job Roles in Washington
See all 838+ Software Engineer AI Jobs in Washington
Sign up for free to filter by visa type, set job alerts, and find employers with verified sponsorship history.
Search Software Engineer AI Jobs in WashingtonSoftware Engineer AI Jobs in Washington: Frequently Asked Questions
Which companies sponsor visas for software engineers in AI roles in Washington?
Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are among the most active H-1B visa sponsors for AI and machine learning engineering roles in Washington, with large engineering campuses in Redmond, Seattle, and Kirkland. Mid-size AI companies like Appen, Tableau (Salesforce), and Convoy have also filed sponsorships in the state. Startups in the Seattle area working on LLM infrastructure, computer vision, and MLOps have increasingly pursued sponsorship for specialized AI engineers.
Which visa types are most common for software engineer AI roles in Washington?
The H-1B is the most common visa for AI software engineering roles in Washington, as these positions typically require a bachelor's degree or higher in computer science, machine learning, or a related field, satisfying the specialty occupation requirement. O-1A visas are an option for candidates with notable research publications, patents, or awards in AI. Australians may qualify for the E-3 visa, and Canadian or Mexican nationals may explore TN visa status under the software engineer category.
Which cities in Washington have the most software engineer AI sponsorship jobs?
Seattle and Redmond account for the overwhelming majority of AI software engineering sponsorship activity in Washington. Redmond is anchored by Microsoft's global headquarters and its Azure AI and Copilot engineering teams. Seattle hosts Amazon's core AI and Alexa science divisions, plus a dense cluster of AI startups and research labs. Bellevue and Kirkland have grown as secondary hubs, with several mid-size technology companies maintaining AI engineering teams there.
How to find software engineer ai visa sponsorship jobs in Washington?
Migrate Mate filters software engineer AI jobs in Washington specifically by visa sponsorship availability, so you're not wading through listings from employers who don't sponsor. Search by role and state to see active openings from companies that have a documented history of filing H-1B and other work visas for AI engineering positions in the Seattle-Redmond area and beyond. This saves significant time compared to manually researching each employer's sponsorship history.
Are there any Washington-specific considerations for AI software engineer sponsorship candidates?
Washington has no state income tax, which affects total compensation comparisons but not the sponsorship process itself. The University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering produces a strong pipeline of international AI talent, and many Seattle-area employers actively recruit from it. Washington's high concentration of large technology employers means H-1B cap-exempt filings are less common here than at universities, so most candidates will go through the annual H-1B lottery process unless hired by a qualifying nonprofit research organization.
What is the prevailing wage for sponsored software engineer ai jobs in Washington?
U.S. employers sponsoring a visa must pay at least the prevailing wage, which is what workers in the same role, area, and experience level typically earn. The Department of Labor sets this rate to make sure companies aren't hiring foreign workers simply because they'd accept lower pay than a U.S. worker. It varies by job title, location, and experience. You can look up current prevailing wage rates for any occupation and location using the OFLC Wage Search page.