Principal Software Engineer

Aderant is a global industry leading software company providing comprehensive business management solutions for law firms and other professional services organizations with a mission to help them run a better business. We are motivated by a collective desire to drive the legal industry to the forefront of innovation. With over 2,500 clients around the world, including 95 of the top AmLaw 100 firms, we are changing the outside perception of the legal sphere; where there was once resistance to modernization, we are creating a culture that embraces new ideas and technology.At Aderant, the “A” is more than just a letter. It is a representation of how we fulfill our foundational purpose, serving our clients. It embodies our core values and reminds us that to achieve success, every day must start with the “A”. We bring the “A” to life by fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration, and personal growth. We encourage our diverse teams to bring their whole selves to work – ideas, experience, and passion – to drive our mission forward.Our people are our strength.We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to help build Aderant Talent, the next generation of vi by Aderant. Our talent management suite is used by the world's leading law firms to recruit, evaluate, develop, and allocate their people. This is a greenfield platform on AWS, with a backend of TypeScript/Node and Go services over MongoDB, behind a React front end.You will set service boundaries, document models, API contracts, and engineering standards while they are still cheap to change. Two things make the work hard. Aderant Talent holds some of the most sensitive data a firm has, including performance evaluations and candidate records, so every design decision has to hold up under that scrutiny. And we are embedding AI directly into evaluation and staffing workflows, which is a real engineering problem rather than an API call. This is an individual contributor role with organization-wide influence: you will not manage people, but your designs and standards will shape how the whole team builds.ResponsibilitiesTechnical LeadershipOwn the end-to-end architecture: service decomposition, API strategy, and the platform foundations the product will sit on for yearsOwn the MongoDB data architecture, including document modeling, indexing strategy, schema evolution, and the tenant isolation model. These are the hardest decisions to reverse once customer data is in productionOwn the migration and coexistence strategy from the current vi products, covering data migration and phased customer transitionSet the technical strategy for AI-enabled features: model selection, prompt and context design, output quality evaluation, cost and latency, and the guardrails appropriate to performance and staffing decisionsArchitect for a deeply configurable product without fragmenting the codebase or making every release a regression riskDefine the architecture for data privacy and access control: role-based and r...