Lead Software Engineer, Platform Engineering

ITHAKA is seeking a Lead Software Engineer, Platform Engineering (Full-Stack) to advance how software is built, delivered, and experienced across its product engineering organization. The role builds and operates internal platforms, tools, and services, combining backend development, CI/CD and automation, and user-facing applications to improve developer experience and software delivery.

Responsibilities:

• Architect, develop, and maintain internal platforms, services, and tooling that support CI/CD, automation, and software delivery
• Drive the product life cycle of the development platform including CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategies, platform automation, and productivity tooling
• Understand developer needs, and apply DevOps and enablement methodologies to improve development velocity, reliability, quality, and operational efficiency through paved paths
• Partner closely with product, platform, and application engineering teams to improve developer workflows and platform usability
• Champion developer experience by ensuring enablement tools are intuitive, accessible, well-documented, and aligned with user needs
• Mentor and coach engineers across teams on architecture, coding standards, DevOps practices, and UI/UX considerations
• Facilitate technical deep dives, design reviews, and training sessions to promote shared learning and best practices
• Practice strong portfolio management, including assessing, prototyping, trialing, implementing, and sunsetting technologies as fit for purpose
• Collaborate to develop internal platform roadmaps and help translate organizational goals into actionable technical initiatives
• Operate with a “You Build It, You Own It” mindset, taking shared responsibility for the reliability, maintainability, security, and evolution of the code you help put into production
• Participate in incident response, production support, troubleshooting, and follow-up remediation
• Improve practices for availability, alerting, performance, capacity, cost, recovery, and technical debt
• Turn operational learning into improvements to the platform and the way it is used

Requirements:

• A minimum of 8 years as a full-stack software engineer delivering large-scale, distributed web applications
• Able to act as a strategic product thinker and community builder
• Proven ability to design and develop scalable backend services and RESTful APIs
• Hands-on development of user-facing or internal web applications using modern frontend frameworks (e.g., React, Vue), informed by UI/UX and accessibility best practices
• Working knowledge of CI/CD concepts, automation, and software delivery pipelines, including tools such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar
• Practical expertise contributing to or operating internal developer platforms, enablement tooling, or shared services
• Strong experience working with AWS (e.g., EC2, S3, Lambda, RDS, EKS) and deploying applications using Docker and Kubernetes
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code technologies such as Terraform
• Experience with event-driven architectures and messaging systems
• Demonstrated ability to troubleshoot, debug, and optimize performance across the stack
• Comfort collaborating in Agile, cross-functional, and distributed or self-directed teams
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate technical concepts, designs, and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• At this time, we're not considering candidates who are unable to work and reside in the continental U.S