Prinicipal Software Engineer

Job description

NetDocuments is committed to providing an excellent candidate experience and will never ask you to engage in recruitment activity without phone, video, and in person meetings and communications from emails using the @netdocuments.com domain. If you have any concerns or questions about communications you have received, please send them to [hrgroup@netdocuments.com](mailto:hrgroup@netdocuments.co) so our team members can review. **About NetDocuments** At NetDocuments, we're shaping the future of legal work. We believe legal professionals should spend less time searching for information and managing documents, and more time solving complex problems, serving clients, and delivering meaningful outcomes. That's why we're building technology that helps organizations work smarter, collaborate more effectively, and unlock the full value of their institutional knowledge. Our team is redefining what's possible for legal technology. NetDocuments is the trusted intelligent document management platform for legal professionals and the company behind the industry's first and only legal context graph—a breakthrough that gives legal professionals and AI a richer understanding of how matters, documents, people, and knowledge connect across an organization while respecting enterprise-grade security, governance, permissions, and ethical walls. Innovation is only part of our story. We believe our greatest strength is our people. We foster a collaborative, inclusive, and high-performing culture where curiosity is encouraged, diverse perspectives are valued, and employees are empowered to make a meaningful impact. Whether you're building products, serving customers, or supporting the business, your work helps shape the future of one of the world's most trusted legal technology platforms. That commitment to our employees and customers has earned us recognition as one of the nation's top workplaces, including: - Four consecutive appearances on the **Inc. 5000** list of America's Fastest-Growing Private Companies - Five-time **Top Workplace USA** winner - Five-time **Salt Lake Tribune Top Workplace** - Multiple **Top Workplaces Culture Excellence** awards recognizing innovation, employee appreciation, work-life flexibility, and compensation & benefits If you're excited to solve meaningful challenges, work alongside talented colleagues, and help define the next generation of legal technology, we'd love to meet you. **You will:** **Founding Technical Leadership** Serve as the founding technical leader for NetDocuments' first Developer Experience (DevX) team, setting technical direction from day one. - Partner with the Senior Product Manager to define the team's charter, roadmap, and success metrics. - Recruit, hire, and mentor the Staff and Senior Software Engineers who will make up the NetDocuments DevX team. - Cross-Team Discovery & Liaison - Partner directly with geographically-disparate engineering teams to understand existing architecture, current tooling, and developer pain points. - Translate that context into a clear, prioritized execution plan for the DevX team. - Build trusted relationships across engineering teams and time zones to drive adoption of DevX-built tools and standards, without relying on formal reporting authority. - Travel occasionally to the US (approximately 1–2 times per year) to deepen collaboration with US engineering leadership. - Architecture & Build - Make build-vs-buy recommendations and set technical direction for internal tooling, developer platforms, and infrastructure-as-code. - Design and build internal tools and platform capabilities intended for use by every engineering team at NetDocuments, built to scale well beyond current needs (e.g. 10x). - Establish shared technical standards and patterns for tooling adopted company-wide. - Stay deeply hands-on, balancing spending time solving complex technical problems alongside your team. **Driving Change & Measuring Impact** - Define and track developer productivity signals (e.g., deploy frequency, cycle time, DORA metrics) to measure DevX's impact. - Partner with the Product Manager and engineering teams to prioritize work based on developer pain points and data, not just technical elegance. - Communicate technical decisions, standards, and roadmap through design docs, Architecture Decision Reviews, and reviews that build buy-in across engineering teams. - Team Building & Mentorship - Set the technical bar and engineering culture for a brand-new team. - Mentor Staff and Senior Software Engineers on platform and tooling best practices. - Lead design and code reviews for high-impact DevX initiatives. **What You'll Need to Be Successful** - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience. - 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, currently operating at the Principal level or above. - Proven experience setting architecture and technical direction across multiple systems or teams. - Experience building internal developer tooling, CI/CD systems, or platform engineering at scale — not just using them. - Experience leading complex, cross-team technical initiatives without formal authority, including across geographies and time zones. - Strong fluency across C#, .NET, Python, AWS, and Java. - Experience defining and using developer productivity metrics (e.g., DORA metrics) to prioritize work and measure impact. - Demonstrated experience mentoring Staff and Senior engineers. - Strong technical writing skills, with experience producing architecture documents, design proposals, and technical standards. - Experience hiring and building a team from the ground up. **What Will Make You Stand Out** - Prior experience founding or scaling a Developer Experience or Platform Engineering team from scratch. - Experience acting as a technical liaison between distributed, cross-country engineering teams (e.g., US and India). - Experience in legal technology, professional-services SaaS, or other regulated enterprise software environments. - Public examples of technical leadership — conference speaking, technical writing, open-source contributions, or architectural patterns adopted by other teams. - Experience partnering closely with a Product Manager to build a roadmap under ambiguity, without an existing backlog to inherit. **Equal Opportunity** *NetDocuments is an Equal Opportunity Employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind. All employment decisions are based on business needs, job requirements, individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, (including pregnancy), national origin, age, physical and mental disability, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, military and veteran status, or any other status protected by laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. NetDocuments believes diversity and inclusion among our employees is critical to our success, and we are committed to providing a work environment free of discrimination and harassment.*