Principal Software Engineer

ITHAKA, Remote within the Continental United States +1

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.

All jobs

Principal Software Engineer

ITHAKA, Remote within the Continental United States +1

Posted pay

$129K–$186K

a year

Compared with similar jobs

This base pay is below the median for principal software engineering jobs that are remote in the US.

Median: $232K a year
Other jobs in the group: 120

We compare the middle of each posted range. This is base pay as posted. The group does not include this job.

Location: Remote within the Continental United States +1
Work type: Remote
Level: Principal
Experience: 12+ years
Skills in the job text: Python
Kubernetes
Java
MySQL
Redis
Spring
Posted: 11 days ago
Last check: 7 h ago
Job type: Software engineering

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ITHAKA

Open tech jobs: 4
With posted pay: 100%

About ITHAKA: funding, hiring and pay

ITHAKA

About ITHAKA: funding, hiring and pay

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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.

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.

Principal Software Engineer

The role

Principal Software Engineer

The role

What you will do

What you need

Lead Level, Lead Software Engineer

Principal level, Principal Software Engineer

Technology Strategy & Architecture

Backend Platform Engineering

Technical Leadership & Innovation

Cross-functional Collaboration

Technical Leadership

Backend Engineering

Platform Engineering & Collaboration

Work Authorization and Sponsorship

Work for ITHAKA

Pay and benefits

About ITHAKA

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