Staff Software Engineer

Hidden Jobs; United States; On-site; USD 170,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) match

Flexible PTO

Learning platform access

Job summary

NetDocuments seeks a Staff Software Engineer to lead the backend direction of a cloud-native platform that converts institutional knowledge into AI-ready content for legal customers. This is a hands-on leadership role focused on scale, performance, reliability, and cost, partnering with Product, Design, Platform Services, and engineering leadership to translate complex requirements into durable systems.

The ideal candidate has proven hands-on leadership, deep experience in distributed systems at

Qualifications

• Proven hands-on technical leadership guiding an engineering team and establishing standards.
• Deep experience designing distributed, cloud-native systems at scale with focus on throughput, reliability, and cost.
• Strong familiarity with modern AI applications in production software.
• Experience with automated testing, CI/CD, and reliable production operations.
• Skill building observability into systems via logging, metrics, tracing, and telemetry.
• Proven ability to partner with Product, Design, and platform teams to deliver complex requirements.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction and engineering standards for a backend team while remaining hands-on.
• Design fast, reliable, and secure cloud-native systems that scale across regions.
• Build and evolve large-scale data processing, search, retrieval, and AI-powered services on customer content.
• Drive architecture discussions and durable technical decisions to raise the team’s bar.
• Ensure systems meet customer-defined security, governance, and data protection requirements.
• Establish observability signals (logs, metrics, tracing) and evidence-based improvements.

Skills

Technical leadership

Distributed systems design

Cloud-native architectures

Performance & reliability

Observability & telemetry

AI in production

CI/CD & automated testing

Job description

Role overview

A backend-focused Staff Software Engineer is needed to lead the technical direction of a cloud-native platform that turns institutional knowledge into AI-ready content for legal industry customers. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an experienced engineer who enjoys tackling hard problems in scale, performance, reliability, and cost, and who wants architectural decisions to compound over time. The position partners closely with Product, Design, Platform Services, and engineering leadership to convert complex requirements into durable systems.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction and engineering standards for a backend engineering team, acting as a hands-on technical leader.
• Design distributed, cloud-native systems that remain fast, reliable, and secure as data volumes grow across regions.
• Build and evolve large-scale data processing, search, retrieval, and AI-powered services that sit on top of customer content.
• Drive architectural discussions, make durable technical decisions, and help raise the technical bar across the team.
• Ensure every system runs inside strict customer-defined security, permissions, governance, and data protection boundaries.
• Establish observability and evaluation signals (logging, metrics, distributed tracing, telemetry) so improvements are evidence-based.

Requirements

• Proven hands-on technical leadership experience guiding an engineering team and shaping its standards.
• Deep background designing distributed, cloud-native systems at scale, with attention to throughput, reliability, and cost.
• Strong working familiarity with modern AI and how it is applied in production software.
• Experience with automated testing, CI/CD practices, and operating production services reliably.
• Skill building observability into systems, including logging, metrics, distributed tracing, and telemetry.
• Track record partnering cross-functionally with Product, Design, and platform teams to deliver complex requirements.

Nice to have

• Experience building search, retrieval, or other data-intensive systems at scale.
• Familiarity with semantic or vector search, embeddings, and retrieval-augmented generation.
• Experience operating high-throughput data or processing pipelines, managing their cost and reliability.
• Background in document management, content services, or other data-intensive enterprise systems.
• Experience integrating AI- or agent-facing services into production applications.
• Background building B2B SaaS for the legal industry or other regulated, security-sensitive environments.
• Contributions to open source projects, technical writing, or community technical sharing.

Benefits and work setup

• Health insurance with 90% of premiums company-covered and an HSA company contribution.
• 401(k) match at 4% with immediate vesting.
• Flexible PTO, typically three to four weeks a year, plus ten paid holidays.
• Monthly contributions toward life activities and wellness.
• Access to a learning platform with dedicated monthly exploration time, plus mentorship from senior leaders.
• Posted cash compensation range of $170,000–$190,000, with individual offers based on experience, skills, qualifications, and location; some roles may qualify for overtime pay.

The employer is an Equal Opportunity Employer and maintains a workplace free from discrimination and harassment.