Docker CEO Steve Singh and COO Scott Johnston at the GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit. (GeekWire photos / Kevin Lisota)

Another Silicon Valley tech company is set to open an office in the Seattle area.

This time it’s Docker, the heavily-funded San Francisco-based company leading the way in container technology, a key component in how companies deploy software in the cloud.

Docker CEO Steve Singh, who joined the company last month, made the announcement during an on-stage interview at the inaugural GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit in Bellevue, Wash. on Wednesday.

“You should expect us to have a very sizable footprint in the Seattle area,” Singh said. He noted that the office will also include sales and marketing staff, in addition to engineers, and did not provide a specific timeline for when it will open.

Singh, who co-founded Bellevue-based travel expense giant Concur and spent two years at SAP after it acquired the company for $8.3 billion, still lives in the region and is familiar with the technical talent available.

“This is an incredible community with incredible technology talent,” he said. “Obviously, it’s cloud city as well.”

Docker CEO Steve Singh.

Many have coined the region as “cloud city” due to the proliferation of cloud-related companies, from giants like Microsoft and Amazon all the way down to smaller startups.

There are also nearly 100 out-of-town companies that have established engineering centers in the Seattle region;  Google, Facebook, Apple, Salesforce, Uber, and many others have sizable offices in the area.

Now you can add Docker to that list. The 7-year-old company, which has raised more than $180 million to date, expects its headcount to double in the next 18 months. It currently employs more than 300 people.

Singh, widely regarded as one of the most accomplished entrepreneurs in the enterprise software arena, said Docker doesn’t necessarily need to raise more money as it increases its headcount.

“One of the things I loved about the company was that it was in a position where it could take its existing growth profile and get to profitability in a relatively short window,” he noted.

Singh, joined by Docker COO Scott Johnston on stage Wednesday, explained that he wants the growth curve for Docker to be exponential, while also making sure that profitability remains a priority.

“It’s important for a company to have discipline in how they spend investor money,” he said. “The reason why we set a bar on profitability is that it forces us to deal with everything in business that needs to be better. Otherwise, it’s too easy when you lose money to hide the problems. The way our management team thinks about it is, let’s make sure we have a really highly-disciplined approach to building our business. We just happen to be in a marketplace that can grow at exponential rates.”

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