Principal software engineer

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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.

What You’ll Do

NetDocuments is seeking a Principal Software Engineer – Intelligent DMS to provide technical leadership across the next generation of our document management platform. This role will help shape the architecture connecting our new web and mobile experiences, design system, extended applications, Microsoft 365 integrations, desktop applications, and AI-powered capabilities into a cohesive platform. You’ll operate as a deeply hands-on technical leader, spending the majority of your time solving complex engineering problems while driving architectural decisions that span multiple teams and products. You’ll partner closely with Product, Design, platform engineering, and our AI teams to establish scalable patterns, simplify complex systems, and ensure the experiences we build meet the reliability, security, performance, and usability standards expected by the world’s leading legal organizations.

You will:

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• 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.

Design & Build

• 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-level permissions across highly concurrent and distributed workflows.

Platform Evolution & Modernization

• 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.

Cross-Team Technical Leadership

• 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.

Engineering Excellence & Mentorship

• 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.

Continuous Learning & Innovation

• 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.

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, 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.

What Will Make You Stand Out

• 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.

What You’ll Love About NetDocuments

The People!

• 90% healthcare premiums company covered
• HSA company contribution
• 401(k) match at 4% with immediate vesting
• Flexible PTO (typically 3 to 4 weeks a year)
• 10 paid holidays
• Monthly contributions for life activities & wellness
• Access to LinkedIn Learning with monthly dedicated time to explore
• Connection, access, and mentorship from exceptional leaders
• Growing company with opportunities for advancement
• Authenticity and accountability from leadership
• Compensation Transparency

The compensation range for this position is $200,000 – $220,000.

The posted cash compensation includes on-target earnings. Some roles may qualify for overtime pay. Individual compensation packages are determined based on factors such as experience, skills, qualifications, and geographic location.

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.