Principal Software Engineer

NetDocuments is a legal technology company building an intelligent document management platform for legal professionals. The Principal Software Engineer will provide hands-on technical leadership for the Intelligent DMS organization, shaping architecture across web, mobile, backend, Microsoft 365, desktop, and AI-powered experiences while driving cross-team engineering initiatives, modernization, reliability, security, and mentorship.

Responsibilities:

• Provide technical leadership across the Intelligent DMS organization, establishing architectural direction and engineering standards that span multiple teams and product surfaces
• Lead architectural decisions across web, mobile, backend services, Microsoft 365 integrations, desktop applications, and AI-powered experiences
• Define shared technical patterns, component contracts, data models, permission models, and integration approaches that create a cohesive platform
• Lead complex, cross-team engineering initiatives from early product ideation through architecture, implementation, and production
• Evaluate architectural trade-offs across scalability, security, performance, usability, maintainability, and speed of delivery
• Simplify complex systems and establish technical foundations that enable teams to move faster as the platform evolves
• Contribute directly to the most complex and consequential areas of the Intelligent DMS platform
• Design and build cloud-native applications, microservices, integrations, and customer-facing experiences at enterprise scale
• Help architect the next-generation web and mobile applications and the backend services that support them
• Establish patterns for integrating AI capabilities such as assistants, summarization, extraction, and intelligent search into everyday document workflows
• Lead technical design for Microsoft 365 experiences, including co-authoring and integrations across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook
• Design solutions that maintain correctness, security, and matter-levl permissions across highly concurrent and distributed workflows
• Define technical strategies for evolving mature applications and integrations onto the next-generation platform without disrupting critical customer workflows
• Establish migration patterns that allow legacy and next-generation experiences to operate effectively during platform transitions
• Drive technical coherence across extended applications, desktop clients, sync, import, browser extensions, mobile applications, and Microsoft 365 integrations
• Partner with platform and AI engineering teams to establish scalable integration patterns for shared services and capabilities
• Set performance and reliability standards for customer-facing applications and drive systemic improvements required to meet them
• Lead technical initiatives involving multiple engineering teams without relying on formal reporting authority
• Build alignment across Engineering, Product, Design, Platform, and AI teams around architectural direction and implementation strategy
• Translate ambiguous product opportunities into clear technical requirements, architecture, and executable plans
• Document architectural decisions and ensure teams understand the reasoning, trade-offs, and standards behind them
• Serve as a technical escalation point when teams encounter complex architectural or engineering challenges
• Mentor engineers across experience levels, including Senior and Staff Engineers, and provide guidance on architecture, system design, and engineering practices
• Drive testing, quality, security, and reliability strategies across the Intelligent DMS organization
• Establish and maintain architecture documentation, engineering standards, and technical patterns that scale beyond individual projects
• Lead design and code reviews for complex or high-impact initiatives
• Partner with other Principal Engineers and our Chief Architect to advance technical excellence across the broader engineering organization
• Support recruiting and interviewing efforts to help build a high-performing engineering team
• Stay current with advancements in AI-native product development, distributed systems, cloud architecture, and modern software engineering
• Evaluate emerging technologies and determine where they can meaningfully improve customer experience or engineering effectiveness
• Validate new technical approaches with real users and production feedback before scaling them broadly
• Champion engineering practices that prioritize simplicity, measurable customer value, and sustainable technical foundations

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated experience operating at the Staff level or above
• Proven experience setting architecture and technical direction across multiple products, systems, or engineering teams
• Experience leading complex, cross-team technical initiatives without formal authority and driving alignment across engineering stakeholders
• Deep expertise in system design, distributed systems, cloud applications, microservices, and enterprise-scale integrations
• Strong full stack engineering experience with the ability to work across frontend and backend systems; our technology stack includes C#, .NET, React, and TypeScript
• Experience designing and operating cloud-native systems using AWS, Azure, or comparable cloud technologies
• Experience translating ambiguous product requirements into clear technical architecture and implementation plans
• Demonstrated experience mentoring senior engineers and providing technical guidance across teams
• Strong technical writing skills with experience creating architecture documents, design proposals, and technical decision records
• Experience shipping AI-native product experiences where AI is fundamental to the product workflow
• Experience operating multi-tenant enterprise platforms with strict security, compliance, or data residency requirements
• Experience with Microsoft 365 extensibility, including Office add-ins, Microsoft Graph, or co-authoring technologies
• Experience modernizing legacy applications while maintaining heavily used production systems and managing complex customer migrations
• Experience in legal technology, professional-services SaaS, or other regulated enterprise software environments
• Public examples of technical leadership through conference speaking, technical writing, open-source contributions, or architectural patterns adopted by other teams
• A track record of leading complex technical initiatives through both successful outcomes and lessons learned from approaches that did not work