Principal Software Engineer

ITHAKA is hiring a Principal Software Engineer to lead the technology vision and backend engineering for JSTOR’s Books and royalty payment platforms. The role combines hands-on engineering with architectural strategy, platform reliability, technical leadership, and cross-functional collaboration to build scalable, reliable experiences.

Responsibilities:

• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• Define and drive the multi-year backend technology strategy for the Books and royalty payment platforms: deciding what to rebuild, consolidate, or retire, and sequencing that work to deliver incrementally without disrupting live order and payment cycles
• Lead architectural decisions, driving consistency through shared technical direction, engineering standards, and reusable platform capabilities, and building alignment through influence rather than formal authority
• Own the end-to-end technical integrity of our financial flows (ordering, fulfillment, invoicing, and royalty payments), ensuring calculations, records, and partner exchanges are correct, auditable, and reconcilable across internal systems, CRM, our Financial system, and external partners
• Set platform-wide engineering standards for idempotency, retry and duplicate handling, data reconciliation, and failure recovery across asynchronous, scheduled, and partner-integrated processes
• Establish strategies for observability, service reliability, and platform operations; define the SLOs, health metrics, and success measures that guide long-term technical investment
• Serve as the senior technical counterpart for integrations with partners, CRM and Financial teams, and data platform teams, negotiating interface contracts and change plans across organizational boundaries
• Influence stakeholders by clearly communicating architectural strategy, engineering tradeoffs, technology investments, risks, and long-term technical vision, and represent the platform in cross-organization architecture forums
• Develop other engineers into technical leaders

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience
• 12+ year of experience
• Experience designing, building, and operating distributed backend systems in production
• Demonstrated experience defining technology strategy, leading cross-team architectural initiatives, and influencing technical direction through collaboration and sound engineering judgment
• Experience balancing hands-on engineering with long-term architecture, platform evolution, product strategy, and organizational priorities
• Strong product thinking with the ability to connect backend and search strategy to user needs, business goals, product outcomes, and measurable impact
• Deep expertise building distributed backend systems using Java or Python
• Extensive experience designing and evolving service-oriented architectures, REST APIs, asynchronous processing, and event-driven systems
• Deep understanding of cloud-native architecture, scalability, reliability engineering, performance optimization, and modern observability practices
• Strong experience designing and operating cloud-native applications using Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, modern observability tooling, relational and NoSQL databases, caching technologies, and messaging platforms
• Experience building reusable platform capabilities, engineering standards, developer tooling, automation, and AI-assisted development workflows that improve engineering effectiveness across multiple teams
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to build alignment, influence technical direction, and communicate architectural strategy, tradeoffs, product implications, and investment recommendations to engineering, product, and executive stakeholders
• 12+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, with deep expertise in backend architecture and technical leadership, including leading a platform through multiple years of evolution
• Demonstrated experience defining technology strategy, leading cross-team architectural initiatives, and producing written strategy and architecture documents that led to adopted decisions
• Track record of owning the architecture of systems where correctness has direct financial consequences, such as order management, billing, payments, royalties, or revenue systems
• Deep practical experience with consistency in distributed and integrated systems: idempotent processing, deduplication, outbox and event-driven patterns, reconciliation, and recovery from partial failure
• Experience incrementally improving a production platform while it continues to serve the business, such as moving business logic out of the database or batch jobs, or decomposing and consolidating services
• Experience integrating with enterprise systems (CRM, Finance, tax engines) and with external partners through file-based and API-based contracts
• Demonstrated ability to define and drive reliability programs with measurable outcomes, including SLOs, operational metrics, and incident practice
• ITHAKA is not currently considering candidates who require any type of immigration sponsorship (additional work authorization or permanent work authorization) to work in the United States
• Preferred: domain experience in publishing, digital content licensing, royalty or rights management, or revenue operations