Staff Software Engineer - OCR / Text Extraction

What You'll Do

Every document that enters NetDocuments passes through our content extraction and transformation platform, which turns scanned images, PDFs and Office files into searchable text, structured data, and the foundation for AI features like semantic search. We process documents at very high volume, on an event-driven platform built on AWS.

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to set the technical direction for this platform and, over time, lead the team that builds it. You'll design the distributed systems that process millions of documents an hour, bring AI-powered extraction into production, and lead an engineering practice where AI agents are part of how we design, build and test software.

This is a hands-on role. You'll write production code, make architecture decisions that hold up over time, and raise the technical bar for the engineers around you.

You will:

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Set technical direction for our document content extraction and transformation platform, establishing patterns for scalable, secure, and cost-efficient systems on AWS.
• Design and own distributed, event-driven pipelines that process millions of documents an hour, including how they scale, how they fail, and how they recover.
• Lead architectural decisions involving OCR technologies such as Tesseract and Apryse, and AI models for document understanding.
• Drive improvements in throughput, reliability and performance, while controlling cost per document without affecting customer experience.
• Make critical technical decisions that balance performance, security, cost and maintainability, with reasoning that stands up over time.

Build & Operate

• Build production services in C#/.NET using AWS (such as ECS, Lambda, S3 and SQS) and event streaming with Kafka.
• Design resilient processing: retries, dead-letter handling, idempotency, backpressure, and graceful recovery. No silent failures.
• Design and implement scalable APIs (REST, GraphQL) that power our product and enable third-party integrations.
• Implement observability through logging, metrics, tracing and telemetry (Datadog, CloudWatch) to find and fix issues before customers notice.
• Ensure security, compliance and confidentiality across all implementations. Legal documents are privileged, and our systems treat them that way.

AI in the Product

• Build the content pipelines that power semantic search: chunking, embeddings, vector indexing and evaluation, at the scale of millions of documents.
• Measure and improve AI output quality with evaluation sets and metrics, while managing cost and latency in production.

AI in How We Build

• Lead the team's AI-assisted development practice, using AI agents such as Claude Code across specification, design, testing and implementation.
• Set the standards for reviewing and approving AI-generated work so that speed never comes at the cost of quality.

Ownership & Collaboration

• Take full ownership of initiatives from concept through production and ongoing evolution.
• Proactively identify and address technical debt before it affects the team or customers.
• Partner with product management to turn requirements into technical solutions, and with Platform Services, Operations and other teams on shared infrastructure.
• Mentor engineers at every level through design reviews, code reviews and documentation.
• Build agreement on technical approaches, while having the authority to make the final call when needed.
• Research and prove out new technologies through POCs that align with product strategy.

What You'll Need to Be Successful

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience delivering production systems at scale on cloud platforms.
• Proven experience designing and owning distributed, event-driven systems that process high volumes in production. Please describe the scale of the systems you've built in your resume (for example, events or documents per hour or per day).
• Experience leading technical direction for a team: making architecture decisions, setting standards, and growing other engineers.
• U.S. citizenship is required for this role.
• Expert proficiency in C#/.NET.
• Expert proficiency designing event-driven, microservice-based systems, including failure handling, scaling and recovery.
• Strong experience with Kafka or similar event streaming and messaging platforms.
• Strong experience developing on cloud platforms, preferably AWS.
• Strong experience with observability (logging, metrics, tracing, telemetry), preferably with Datadog.
• Deep hands-on experience with OCR or document extraction technologies, such as Tesseract, Apryse, ABBYY, AWS Textract or Azure Document Intelligence.
• Daily use of AI coding tools (for example, Claude Code or GitHub Copilot) across the development lifecycle, with sound judgment about reviewing and validating AI generated code.

What Will Make You Stand Out

• You know what it takes to ingest millions of documents an hour into a SaaS platform, and you've done it.
• Experience building document management, enterprise content management, or high performance content extraction products. 
• Experience in the legal industry or in B2B SaaS for regulated industries.

Compensation Transparency  

The compensation range for this position is:  $170,000 - $190,000

The posted cash compensation for this position includes on target earnings. Some roles may qualify for overtime pay. Individual compensation packages are determined based on various factors specific to each candidate, such as career level, skills, experience, geographic location, qualifications, and other job-related considerations.