Prinicipal Software Engineer

About this job

As a Principal Software Engineer at NetDocuments in Hyderabad, you will serve as the founding technical leader for the company's first Developer Experience team, guiding technical direction and building internal platforms from day one. NetDocuments creates intelligent document management technology that helps legal professionals manage workflows and unlock institutional knowledge. Your normal day involves partnering with product managers and distributed teams to identify developer pain points, designing scalable internal tooling, setting architectural standards, mentoring senior engineers, and staying hands-on with complex technical problem-solving. You will also collaborate across time zones and travel internationally occasionally to align with engineering leadership.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the founding technical leader for NetDocuments' first Developer Experience team.
• Partner with the Senior Product Manager to define roadmaps, charters, and success metrics.
• Recruit, hire, mentor, and set the engineering culture for Staff and Senior Software Engineers.
• Partner with global engineering teams to understand architecture, tooling, and developer pain points.
• Make build-vs-buy recommendations and design scalable internal tools and platform capabilities.
• Define and track developer productivity signals like deploy frequency and DORA metrics.
• Lead design and code reviews and write technical design documents.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related 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 across geographies.
• Strong fluency across C#, .NET, Python, AWS, and Java.
• Demonstrated experience hiring and building a team from the ground up and mentoring senior staff.

Good 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 regulated enterprise software environments.
• Public examples of technical leadership such as conference speaking or open-source contributions.

Who should apply

This role suits an experienced software engineering leader currently operating at a Principal level or above who excels at building platform and developer experience teams from scratch. Candidates should have extensive background in architecture, internal tooling, and cross-functional leadership across global time zones. If you have a strong technical foundation in C#, .NET, Python, AWS, and Java, and enjoy mentoring senior talent while defining company-wide technical standards, you will thrive in this environment. Freshers should not apply as 10+ years of professional experience is required.

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