Description
We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to serve as the founding technical leader for NetDocuments' first Developer Experience (DevX) team, setting technical direction from day one.
You will partner with the Senior Product Manager to define the team's charter, roadmap, and success metrics. You will recruit, hire, and mentor the Staff and Senior Software Engineers who will make up the NetDocuments DevX team.
Key responsibilities:
- Partner 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Define and track developer productivity signals to measure DevX's impact.
- Partner with the Product Manager and engineering teams to prioritize work based on developer pain points and data.
- Communicate technical decisions, standards, and roadmap through design docs, Architecture Decision Reviews, and reviews that build buy-in across engineering teams.
- 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.
Requirements:
- 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.
- Experience leading complex, cross-team technical initiatives without formal authority.
- Strong fluency across C#, .NET, Python, AWS, and Java.
- Experience defining and using developer productivity metrics.
- Demonstrated experience mentoring Staff and Senior engineers.
- Strong technical writing skills.
- Experience hiring and building a team from the ground up.
Nice to have:
- 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.
- Experience in legal technology, professional-services SaaS, or other regulated enterprise software environments.
- Public examples of technical leadership.
- Experience partnering closely with a Product Manager to build a roadmap under ambiguity.