Principal Software Engineer

About this role

ITHAKA’s mission is to expand access to knowledge and education around the world. Our services — JSTOR, Portico, and Ithaka S+R — enable people everywhere to learn, to grow, and to overcome barriers to education. In carrying out our mission, as employees we feel a deep responsibility to members of our community and to each other, and we are committed to building and sustaining a culture where everyone can thrive.

Level
Depending on experience and qualifications, ITHAKA is open to considering candidates in the following levels:
Lead Level, Lead Software Engineer:

• Expected to bring strong technical skills and adaptability, with opportunities to grow into leadership or more autonomous roles.

• Focuses on hands-on contributions and learning through collaboration on challenging projects.

• 5+ years of experience

Principal level, Principal Software Engineer:

• Expected to lead with a high degree of autonomy, taking ownership of complex initiatives and driving innovation.

• Will mentor other engineers, contributing to their growth and the team’s overall expertise.

• Plays a key role in shaping strategic goals and optimizing workflows for scalability and impact.

• 12+ year of experience

The Role
ITHAKA is looking for a Lead / Principal Software Engineer to lead the technology vision for JSTOR’s Business platform team for Books and Royalty Payments.
As part of ITHAKA, JSTOR helps researchers, educators, students, and lifelong learners around the world discover and engage with trusted scholarly knowledge. In this role, you’ll shape the future of the books on JSTOR.
As the senior technical leader for backend engineering, you’ll remain an active technical contributor while combining hands-on engineering with long-term architectural leadership. You’ll define and evolve the backend architecture, distributed systems, search platform, APIs, data pipelines, and engineering practices that power scalable, reliable experiences across JSTOR.
You’ll influence technology direction across multiple engineering teams, mentor other engineers and technical leaders, and apply strong product thinking to align backend strategy with user needs, product vision, business priorities, system quality, and long-term platform health.
Responsibilities
Technology Strategy & Architecture

• Define and drive the multi-year backend technology strategy and architectural roadmap for the Books and royalty payment platforms, aligning engineering investments with user needs, product strategy, organizational priorities, and long-term platform goals.

• Lead architectural decisions across multiple engineering teams, building alignment through technical leadership and influence rather than formal authority.

• Evaluate emerging backend, AI, and distributed systems technologies, translating them into pragmatic recommendations that improve products, platforms, developer productivity, scalability, and maintainability.

• Apply product thinking to balance long-term platform evolution with near-term product delivery, making thoughtful tradeoffs across user impact, business value, engineering quality, reliability, operational complexity, developer productivity, and cost.

• Drive architectural consistency across teams through shared technical direction, engineering standards, and reusable platform capabilities.

Backend Platform Engineering

• Lead the architecture and evolution of ITHAKA's royalty payment and fulfillment backend platforms: the distributed services, APIs, batch and scheduled processing, and data integrations behind JSTOR's books and archive licensing.

• Design, build and improve highly available ordering and digital book fulfillment systems using Java, Spring Boot, Maven, MySQL (Flyway, stored procedures), and Redis, with attention to schema design, query performance, idempotency, scalability, resiliency and observability.

• Drive practical use of AI in engineering and operations: AI-assisted development and code review, anomaly detection on order and payment flows, and LLM-assisted support and diagnostics.

• Adopt organization-wide strategies for analytics, experimentation, observability, service reliability, and platform operations that enable continuous product improvement.

• Define engineering health metrics and platform success measures, such as order SLA attainment, error and recovery rates, end-to-end latency, and reconciliation accuracy, to guide long-term technical investment.

• Improve backend quality, developer experience, platform reliability and operational excellence.

Technical Leadership & Innovation

• Lead by example through hands-on engineering, architecture, and operational excellence on complex backend, partner, and platform challenges.

• Build reusable services, frameworks, tooling, platform capabilities, and engineering practices that improve developer productivity, software quality, and delivery effectiveness.

• Mentor engineers and technical leaders through architecture reviews, technical guidance, and knowledge sharing.

• Drive architectural documentation, technical decision records, and engineering guidance that improve organizational alignment and long-term maintainability.

• Foster a culture of curiosity, innovation, ownership, continuous learning, and engineering excellence while creating clarity in ambiguous situations.

Cross-functional Collaboration

• Partner with Product, AI, External Partners, Data Science, and Platform Engineering to define technology strategy, align engineering investments, validate solutions, and deliver measurable improvements to Books experiences and royalty payment efficiencies.

• Champion a product engineering culture that combines deep technical excellence with product thinking, empathy for users, experimentation, and measurable outcomes.

Additional responsibilities for Principal level include:

• Define and drive the multi-year backend technology strategy for the Books and royalty payment platforms: deciding what to rebuild, consolidate, or…