Prinicipal Software Engineer

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