Meet the Engineer: Peleg Atar

Meet the Engineer is a recurring series on the Docusign Engineering blog where we sit down with the people building our IAM platform, in their own words. The clearest way to understand what it's actually like to work here is hearing our engineers talk about the problems they're solving and how they think.

What are you working on right now, and what’s the hardest part of it?

I’m leading Docusign’s efforts to bring post-quantum cryptography, or PQC, solutions to our Trust Products, including digital signatures and platform seals. Our goal is to help customers prepare for future security threats and protect the authenticity, integrity, and long-term validity of their agreements.

PQC is often described as a digital-signature challenge, but the problem is broader. Quantum computing may also affect public-key encryption through “harvest now, decrypt later” scenarios. For digital signatures, there is a related long-term risk: agreements signed today may need to remain authentic and verifiable many years from now. This makes PQC central to both our Trust Products strategy and our broader security roadmap.

The hardest part is solving tomorrow’s security challenges without disrupting today’s customer experience. PQC requires changes across cryptography, certificates, signing, validation, infrastructure, compliance, and customer integrations. At the same time, customers need their existing workflows and documents to continue working reliably. The opportunity is to help Docusign stay ahead of this transition while making the experience as seamless as possible for customers.

Outside of work, what’s something you’re into that ends up shaping how you think about your job?

Outside of work, two things I really enjoy are cooking and playing tennis. Cooking gives me a chance to experiment and be creative. I enjoy working with different tools and methods, grilling, using a pizza oven, or smoking food, and learning how small changes in temperature, timing, preparation, or ingredients affect the result.

What I like most about cooking is that it encourages curiosity and continuous improvement. Not every experiment works, and sometimes the result is very different from what I expected. Instead of seeing that as failure, I try to understand what happened, learn from it, and improve the next attempt. That mindset has shaped how I approach engineering as well. I try to experiment thoughtfully, learn quickly, and not be afraid to change course when the first approach doesn’t work.

Tennis teaches me a different but complementary lesson. During a match, I need to understand the other player, recognize patterns, plan my strategy, and adjust my tactics as the game develops. A plan that works in one situation may not work in the next, so I need to stay focused and respond to what is actually happening.

I see a strong connection to my role as an engineering leader. The same instinct to prepare, observe, and adjust applies whether I’m solving a customer problem or helping a team through a complex technical challenge. Perfect results rarely come from following a plan blindly; they come from learning throughout the process.

Peleg making pizza

"Cooking gives me a chance to experiment and be creative"

What’s a problem unique to Docusign’s scale that you didn’t anticipate until you joined?

Before joining Docusign, I thought scale was primarily about handling more customers, transactions, traffic, and data. I quickly learned that enterprise scale is much broader than that. In Trust Products, we work across cloud services, hardware, cryptography, certificate authorities, regulatory requirements, customer integrations, and globally distributed teams.

A change that looks small within one component can have implications across signing, validation, compliance, reliability, and customer experience. In many cases, the technical solution is only one part of the challenge. We also need to consider how it will interact with existing systems, external standards, customer environments, and products that were built at different times.

This has taught me to think beyond the boundaries of a single team or system. At Docusign’s scale, successful engineering requires understanding the full ecosystem, identifying dependencies early, and creating alignment across many teams before implementation begins.

Walk us through a technical decision on this project you’d make differently if you started over.

If I started over, I would have elevated PQC much earlier as an enterprise-wide security and infrastructure priority, not only as a Trust Products feature.

It is easy to initially view PQC as a digital-signature problem: updating platform seals and signature algorithms. But the challenge is broader. It also involves encryption, data in transit, Transport Layer Security (TLS), infrastructure, certificate management, platform services, compliance, and customer integrations. The risks and dependencies extend well beyond the boundaries of one product organization.

As a leader, I would have promoted the issue earlier across the company, brought the relevant teams together sooner, and created a shared inventory and transition plan at the beginning of the effort. I would also have worked earlier with infrastructure, security, compliance, product, and customer-facing teams to establish a common understanding of the risks and priorities.

That would have helped us identify dependencies earlier, align investment sooner, and ensure that PQC readiness was treated as a company capability rather than a feature owned by one product group. It is a good example of how leadership is not only about making technical decisions, it is also about recognizing the true scope of a problem and creating the right level of organizational attention around it.

What’s the most interesting problem you’ve solved that customers will never see or know about?

One of the most interesting challenges in Trust Products is solving complex trust and security problems in a frictionless way. Customers need strong protection for the authenticity, integrity, and long-term validity of their agreements, but they should not have to understand the cryptography, certificate chains, hardware security modules, validation services, or infrastructure behind that protection.

The goal is to give customers both a high level of trust and a simple, intuitive user experience. That means making sure agreements remain secure and verifiable while the signing and validation processes feel seamless and familiar.

When this work is done well, the complexity remains behind the scenes. Customers simply see a smooth experience and receive an agreement they can trust. For me, that is one of the most rewarding parts of working on Trust Products: solving difficult technical problems in a way that creates confidence without adding friction.

How would you describe the engineering culture at Docusign?

Trust Products are a good example of why collaboration is so important. Delivering a secure and reliable experience requires partnership across engineering, product, security, compliance, operations, infrastructure, and external ecosystem partners. No single team can solve the entire problem in isolation.

As a leader, I try to create clarity around the outcome while giving teams the autonomy to determine how to get there. I believe in staying close enough to the technical details to ask the right questions, while giving experienced teams the space to make decisions and grow. The strongest results come when people feel trusted, supported, and accountable for the impact of their work.

"What I like most about cooking is that it encourages curiosity and continuous improvement"

What made you choose engineering, or what keeps you in it?

What keeps me in engineering is the combination of continuous learning, problem-solving, and meaningful customer impact. Over more than three decades in technology, I’ve worked across software engineering, security, cryptography, Public Key Infrastructure, digital signatures, cloud services, and global R&D leadership. Each stage of my career has introduced new technologies, new challenges, and new opportunities to grow.

My role has evolved significantly over time, from being close to the code and architecture to leading large, distributed R&D organizations. That growth has required me to keep learning not only as a technologist, but also as a leader: how to build strong teams, make decisions in complex environments, create alignment across functions, and help people develop their own careers.

Today, I’m increasingly focused on understanding our customers’ real challenges, identifying where friction exists, and helping our teams remove it. I believe the customer should be at the center of every engineering decision. What continues to motivate me is seeing complex technical work become a simpler, more secure, and more trusted experience for customers, and knowing that I’m still learning and growing alongside the people and teams I lead.

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Interested in solving problems like this? Docusign's engineering team is hiring across search, storage, identity, and AI infrastructure. See open Engineering roles →