About the role
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.