Principal Software Engineer

Location: Seattle, Washington

Department: Engineering

Work Mode: Hybrid

About the Role

Docusign brings agreements to life. Over 1.5 million customers and more than a billion people in over 180 countries use Docusign solutions to accelerate business and simplify lives. With our Intelligent Agreement Management platform, we unleash business-critical data trapped in documents, integrating it with e-signature and contract lifecycle management (CLM) as the #1 provider. Join our innovative culture where trust, equality, and customer obsession drive us to make the world more agreeable. The Collaboration & Negotiation team, formerly part of Lexion (acquired by Docusign), seeks a Principal Software Engineer to define, architect, and deliver next-generation AI-powered contract redlining tools. As an individual contributor reporting to the Sr. Manager, Machine Learning, you will spearhead reliable, performant AI systems powering our core AI Assisted Review offering. Cover the full feature lifecycle—from problem formulation and data gathering to model architecture and seamless integration with e-signature and CLM products—while rewarding efficient work in a large organization, customer-first mindset, collaboration, and mentoring. This hybrid role (minimum 2 days/week in-office) demands 15+ years of experience, including 8+ in production AI engineering. Leverage your back-end expertise (.NET preferred), ML lifecycle leadership, and scalable systems to innovate in document understanding and redlining. Collaborate across teams, prototype cutting-edge NLP/Generative AI, and ensure extensible, secure architectures aligned with DocuSign's global scale. Thrive in our agile, fast-iteration environment with passion for new tech, self-starting drive, and commitment to excellence. At Docusign, you'll feel pride in transformative work, supported by competitive pay, RSUs, comprehensive benefits, and a culture of listening, honesty, and equal opportunity.

Key Responsibilities

• Spearhead design, architecture, and development of robust, performant AI systems for contract review and redlining in DocuSign's Intelligent Agreement Management platform
• Lead full ML lifecycle: problem formulation, data gathering, feature engineering, model selection/training/evaluation, deployment, and monitoring
• Join customer calls to gather insights driving ML improvements and AI-assisted review features for e-signature and CLM
• Write production-ready code for ML pipelines, APIs, services integrating with DocuSign's e-signature ecosystem
• Ensure extensible ML architectures across product features; lead ML/AI-focused technical designs and code reviews
• Collaborate with Product Management, UX, engineering, QA, and MLOps for requirements, estimates, scalable CI/CD, and testing
• Propose/implement MLOps/ML engineering process improvements to boost team productivity and efficiency
• Stay current on ML advancements (NLP/Generative AI); research, prototype new features for contract redlining
• Proactively raise issues on model performance/data quality; fix production issues in inference pipelines for system stability
• Mentor junior engineers while thriving in DocuSign's innovative, customer-first culture post-Lexion acquisition

Required Qualifications

• 15+ years of software product development experience, with at least 8 years in production-grade engineering for AI-powered products
• Proven experience designing, developing, and deploying highly scalable, consumer-facing ML applications and services
• Strong back-end development experience with modern server-side languages such as .NET (preferred), JVM (Java/Scala), NodeJS, or equivalent
• Hands-on experience with NoSQL and SQL databases, Docker/containerization, scalable microservices, and improving large existing codebases
• Proficiency with Git or similar version control systems
• BS degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a relevant quantitative field
• Fluency in English (verbal and written)

Preferred Qualifications

• Expertise in NLP, Information Extraction, or Generative AI (LLMs) for document understanding, text summarization, or generation
• Experience with React/TypeScript, cloud technologies (Azure, Kubernetes, AWS), and agile environments with fast ML iteration cycles
• Track record aligning ML architecture with security, data privacy, governance; building consensus for ML infrastructure changes
• SaaS experience, passion for new technologies, and proven self-starter in independent/team settings

Required Skills

• AI/ML engineering for scalable production systems
• Back-end development (.NET preferred, JVM, NodeJS)
• NoSQL/SQL databases
• Docker/containerization
• Scalable microservices architecture
• Git version control
• ML lifecycle management (training, deployment, monitoring)
• NLP/Generative AI for document processing
• MLOps/CI/CD pipelines
• Cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, Kubernetes)
• React/TypeScript
• Agile methodologies with rapid iteration
• Customer insights to ML feature development
• Technical leadership and mentoring
• Cross-team collaboration (PM, UX, QA)
• Code review and architecture design
• Problem-solving for production issues
• Process improvement and innovation

Benefits

• Competitive base salary: $193,100 - $286,500 (WA, MD, NJ, NY incl. NYC metro)
• Company bonus plan based on performance
• Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)
• Paid Time Off and company holidays
• Paid Parental Leave (up to 6 months)
• Comprehensive health benefits (100% employer-paid options from day one)
• Retirement plans with employer contributions
• Learning & Development: coaching, online courses, education reimbursements
• Compassionate Care Leave for life events

DocuSign is an Equal Opportunity Employer.