Principal Software Engineer; Search AI

Company Overview

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 the process of doing business and simplify people’s lives. With intelligent agreement management, Docusign unleashes business-critical data that is trapped inside of documents. Until now, these were disconnected from business systems of record, costing businesses time, money, and opportunity.

Using Docusign’s Intelligent Agreement Management platform, companies can create, commit, and manage agreements with solutions created by the #1 company in e-signature and contract lifecycle management (CLM).

The Docusign AI team is seeking a Principal Software Engineer (Search AI) to act as a seasoned subject matter expert and architect the next generation of our Search & Data Platform. As part of the Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) initiative, our team is transforming customer-facing search capabilities to a modern, highly scalable cloud data platform. You serve as the technical architect behind the discovery engine that powers the world’s most critical agreements.

You drive business growth by transforming Search from a utility into a competitive advantage and directly impacting the scalability of our entire platform.

We are looking for an extensively experienced builder who loves advancing search infrastructure, distributed systems, and solving "never‑been‑done‑before" problems  will work closely with product leaders and engineering leadership ensuring our solutions are fault‑tolerant, secure, and blazingly fast, while consistently driving innovation that advances the overall business.

This position is an individual contributor role reporting to the Director of Engineering, Search.

Responsibility

• Conceive and develop new architectural strategies with a long-range vision, significantly accelerating the Search & Data function’s capabilities

• Drive the strategic roadmap and execution for Docusign’s search infrastructure, ensuring the platform is scalable, resilient, and capable of indexing billions of global agreements

• Design and build fault‑tolerant, high‑throughput search systems using microservices architecture (primarily C#/.NET or Java) and provide technical direction to the team

• Lead the implementation and optimization of search clusters to ensure sub‑second query performance across petabytes of data with enterprise‑grade security and reliability

• Represent the engineering function in large‑scale, complex cross‑functional initiatives

• Act as a matrix leader to drive engineering best practices and translate product requirements into technical designs

• Be a seasoned coach and mentor to experienced team members

• Identify and resolve production issues, ensuring 99.99% availability for critical search services

• Extract added value by continuously raising the standards and expectations across projects and teams

• Work collaboratively across engineering functions, time zones and geographies

Hybrid: Employee divides their time between in‑office and remote work. Access to an office location is required. (Frequency: Minimum 2 days per week; may vary by team but will be weekly in‑office expectation)

Positions at Docusign are assigned a job designation of either In Office, Hybrid or Remote and are specific to the role/job. Preferred job designations are not guaranteed when changing positions within Docusign. Docusign reserves the right to change a position’s job designation depending on business needs and as permitted by local law.

Basic

• BA/BS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Informatics, or equivalent; an advanced degree is highly preferred

• 15+ years of software development experience in object‑oriented languages (C#, Java, C++, or Go), with extensive experience gained in a corporate or relevant business environment

• 6+ years of experience with large‑scale data systems and search engines (e.g., Elasticsearch, Solr) including cluster tuning, index design, and scaling search workloads in a production environment

• Proven track record of delivering search‑related infrastructure or features that handle high‑volume…