Principal Software Engineer

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 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

Experience & Skills

You don’t need experience with every technology listed above. We’re looking for engineers who combine deep technical expertise with product thinking, architectural vision, sound engineering judgment, and a high degree of ownership. People who are curious, collaborative, thrive in ambiguity, and enable organizations to move with urgency while building sustainable, high-quality software will thrive in this role.

Technical Leadership

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.

Backend Engineering

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.

Platform Engineering & Collaboration

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.

For the Principal-level role, in addition to the qualifications mentioned above, the following experience and skills are required:

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.

Preferred: domain experience in publishing, digital content licensing, royalty or rights management, or revenue operations.

Work Authorization and Sponsorship

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.

Compensation and Benefits

At ITHAKA we believe in openness and fair pay. Part of living those values is our commitment to clarity about salary ranges, so candidates know what to expect. The starting salary for the lead level position ranges from $129,076 to $161,345 per year and the starting salary for the Principal level position ranges from $148,437 - $185,547 per year. Starting pay may vary with job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. At present, our total compensation package for benefits-eligible employees includes medical, dental, and vision plans, an 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, and more. Please note that ITHAKA, at its discretion, may make changes to its benefits programs from time to time.

Work for ITHAKA

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. People from a wide range of backgrounds work at ITHAKA, and we believe that unique perspectives help us realize new insights and build better solutions.

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. We enthusiastically welcome applications from people of all backgrounds and credentials. We want to hear your story and include your perspective in the transformative work we aim to do.

Learn more about Working at ITHAKA.

Apply Now

Although ITHAKA has physical offices in New York and Ann Arbor, Michigan, our employees are distributed across the continental United States. At this time, we’re not considering candidates who are unable to work and reside in the continental U.S.

Candidates may apply by submitting an application online through our career site, if you have any questions about your application, please contact us at careers@ithaka.org. ITHAKA is committed to providing reasonable accommodations, if there’s anything we can do to accommodate any portion of the application or hiring process, please contact us at accommodations@ithaka.org.

We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity employer. All qualified applicants receive consideration for employment without regard to identity or other status protected by law. We invite you to read our Equal Employment Opportunity Statement. ITHAKA cares about your privacy, learn more about our Applicant Privacy Notice.