Lead Software Engineer

Operating a reliable global service requires excellent developer experience, platform foundations, and automation. The Developer Platform team is responsible for the internal platforms, tools, and workflows that enable engineers across Docusign to build, ship, and operate services quickly and safely. As a Lead Software Engineer on this team, you will be the technical lead for our Backstage.iobased developer portal and platform ecosystem. You will define the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for the internal platform, build core capabilities and plugins, and partner with product and engineering leaders to drive adoption across the company. You will set engineering standards, mentor other engineers, and lead highimpact, crossteam initiatives that improve reliability, security, and developer productivity at scale.

This position is an individual contributor role reporting to the Manager, Engineering.

Responsibility

Lead the architecture, design, and implementation of our Backstage.iobased internal developer portal, including core services, plugins, and integrations with Docusign's engineering ecosystem (CI/CD, service catalog, observability, internal platforms, and cloud infrastructure)

Own the technical roadmap for the developer platform, aligning with partner teams on priorities that improve developer experience, velocity, and reliability

Design and build scalable, secure, and highly available backend services and APIs that power the platform and integrate with internal and external systems

Establish and champion best practices for platform engineering, service design, observability, testing, and operational excellence across multiple teams

Collaborate closely with product management, SRE, security, infrastructure, and application teams to understand their needs and translate them into simple, robust platform capabilities

Lead complex, multiteam engineering initiatives from design through rollout, including migration strategies, derisking plans, and adoption metrics

Mentor and coach engineers across the organization, providing technical guidance, design reviews, and feedback that raises the overall engineering bar

Instrument features with telemetry and metrics to understand usage, reliability, and impact, and use data to drive continuous improvement

Participate in oncall and incident response for platform services as needed, and drive systematic improvements based on learnings

Job Designation

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.

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience

12+ years of related software engineering experience with a Bachelor's degree, or 8+ years with a Master's degree, including significant time building and operating backend or platform services in production

Proven experience designing, implementing, and operating Backstage.io-based developer portals in production (including custom plugins, catalog integrations, and authentication/authorization flows)

Demonstrated experience building platforms or internal developer platforms (IDPs) that support multiple product teams and services

Strong proficiency in at least one modern backend programming language (e.g., C#, Java, Node.js) and associated frameworks and tooling

Handson experience designing and building scalable, distributed systems and microservices, including APIs, data models, and asynchronous workflows

Experience building and operating services in a major public cloud (Azure, AWS, or GCP), including containerization and orchestration (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes)

Strong grounding in computer science fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, and objectoriented design

Track record of technical leadership at the team or multiteam level: driving architecture, influencing roadmaps, and mentoring other engineers

Preferred

Experience defining and evolving developer experience and platform strategies for medium to large engineering organizations

Experience integrating developer portals with CI/CD systems, service catalogs, incident management, observability, and secrets/configuration management

Familiarity with platform and SRE practices such as SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, progressive delivery, and capacity planning

Experience with secure software development and compliance requirements in enterprise SaaS environments

Experience working in or closely with Cloud & Production Engineering, SRE, or infrastructure teams

Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to partner effectively with senior technical and nontechnical stakeholders across the company

Washington, Maryland, New Jersey and New York (including NYC metro area): $170,900.00 - $251,325.00 base salary

This role is also eligible for the following:

Bonus: Sales personnel are eligible for variable incentive pay dependent on their achievement of pre-established sales goals. Non-Sales roles are eligible for a company bonus plan, which is calculated as a percentage of eligible wages and dependent on company performance. Stock: This role is eligible to receive Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).

Global benefits provide options for the following:

Paid Time Off: earned time off, as well as paid company holidays based on region Paid Parental Leave: take up to six months off with your child after birth, adoption or foster care placement Full Health Benefits Plans: options for 100% employer paid and minimum employee contribution health plans from day one of employment Retirement Plans: select retirement and pension programs with potential for employer contributions Learning and Development: options for coaching, online courses and education reimbursements Compassionate Care Leave: paid time off following the loss of a loved one and other life-changing events

Life at Docusign

Working here

Docusign is committed to building trust and making the world more agreeable for our employees, customers and the communities in which we live and work. You can count on us to listen, be honest, and try our best to do what's right, every day. At Docusign, everything is equal.

We each have a responsibility to ensure every team member has an equal opportunity to succeed, to be heard, to exchange ideas openly, to build lasting relationships, and to do the work of their life. Best of all, you will be able to feel deep pride in the work you do, because your contribution helps us make the world better than we found it. And for that, you'll be loved by us, our customers, and the world in which we live.

Accommodation

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).