[Hiring] Principal Software Engineer @ITHAKA

Role Description

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.

Qualifications

• 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.
• 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.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience for Lead Software Engineer.
• 12+ years of experience for Principal Software Engineer.
• Experience incrementally improving a production platform while it continues to serve the business.
• 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.

Benefits

• Starting salary for the lead level position ranges from $129,076 to $161,345 per year.
• Starting salary for the Principal level position ranges from $148,437 to $185,547 per year.
• Medical, dental, and vision plans.
• Employer-paid 10% retirement contribution.
• Paid parental and caregiver leave.
• 22 days of paid time off.
• 11 paid holidays.
• Up to 12 paid sick days.
• Wellness benefits.

Company Description

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.

We are committed to our organizational values of belonging, evidence, speed, teamwork, and trust. We take seriously the need for everyone to feel welcome. Belonging is one of our core values, and it shows in our vibrant culture.

We want to work with people who are passionate about ideas like these and who wish to contribute their perspectives and talents to ITHAKA’s mission.