{"id":3554893,"url":"https://alion.io/job/ithaka-principal-software-engineer","title":"Principal Software Engineer","company":{"id":18664,"name":"Ithaka","domain":"ithaka.org","url":"https://alion.io/company/ithaka-s-plus-r","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":129076,"max":161345,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":161345},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":12,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Flyway","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Maven","optional":false},{"name":"MySQL","optional":false},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Redis","optional":false},{"name":"Rest API","optional":false},{"name":"SLI/SLO/SLA","optional":false},{"name":"Spring Boot","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-30T21:13:37Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-30","last_verified_at":"2026-11-03T18:24:41Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":3,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":3},"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. 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.\nLevel \nDepending on experience and qualifications, ITHAKA is open to considering candidates in the following levels:\n Lead Level, Lead Software Engineer:\nExpected to bring strong technical skills and adaptability, with opportunities to grow into leadership or more autonomous roles.\nFocuses on hands-on contributions and learning through collaboration on challenging projects.\n5+ years of experience\nPrincipal level, Principal Software Engineer:\nExpected to lead with a high degree of autonomy, taking ownership of complex initiatives and driving innovation.\nWill mentor other engineers, contributing to their growth and the team’s overall expertise.\nPlays a key role in shaping strategic goals and optimizing workflows for scalability and impact. \n12+ year of experience\nThe Role\nITHAKA is looking for a Lead / Principal Software Engineer to lead the technology vision for JSTOR’s Business platform team for Books and Royalty Payments.\nAs 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.\nAs 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.\nYou’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.\nResponsibilities\nTechnology Strategy & Architecture\nDefine 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.\nLead architectural decisions across multiple engineering teams, building alignment through technical leadership and influence rather than formal authority.\nEvaluate emerging backend, AI, and distributed systems technologies, translating them into pragmatic recommendations that improve products, platforms, developer productivity, scalability, and maintainability.\nApply 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.\nDrive architectural consistency across teams through shared technical direction, engineering standards, and reusable platform capabilities.\nBackend Platform Engineering\nLead 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.\nDesign, 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.\nDrive 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.\nAdopt organization-wide strategies for analytics, experimentation, observability, service reliability, and platform operations that enable continuous product improvement.\nDefine 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.\nImprove backend quality, developer experience, platform reliability and operational excellence.\nTechnical Leadership & Innovation\nLead by example through hands-on engineering, architecture, and operational excellence on complex backend, partner, and platform challenges.\nBuild reusable services, frameworks, tooling, platform capabilities, and engineering practices that improve developer productivity, software quality, and delivery effectiveness.\nMentor engineers and technical leaders through architecture reviews, technical guidance, and knowledge sharing.\nDrive architectural documentation, technical decision records, and engineering guidance that improve organizational alignment and long-term maintainability.\nFoster a culture of curiosity, innovation, ownership, continuous learning, and engineering excellence while creating clarity in ambiguous situations.\nCross-functional Collaboration\nPartner 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. \nChampion a product engineering culture that combines deep technical excellence with product thinking, empathy for users, experimentation, and measurable outcomes.\nAdditional responsibilities for Principal level include:\nDefine 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. \nLead architectural decisions, driving consistency through shared technical direction, engineering standards, and reusable platform capabilities, and building alignment through influence rather than formal authority. \nOwn 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. \nSet platform-wide engineering standards for idempotency, retry and duplicate handling, data reconciliation, and failure recovery across asynchronous, scheduled, and partner-integrated processes. \nEstablish strategies for observability, service reliability, and platform operations; define the SLOs, health metrics, and success measures that guide long-term technical investment. \nServe 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. \nInfluence 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.\nDevelop other engineers into technical leaders\nExperience & Skills\nYou 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.\nTechnical Leadership\nExperience designing, building, and operating distributed backend systems in production.\nDemonstrated experience defining technology strategy, leading cross-team architectural initiatives, and influencing technical direction through collaboration and sound engineering judgment.\nExperience balancing hands-on engineering with long-term architecture, platform evolution, product strategy, and organizational priorities.\nStrong product thinking with the ability to connect backend and search strategy to user needs, business goals, product outcomes, and measurable impact.\nBackend Engineering\nDeep expertise building distributed backend systems using Java or Python.\nExtensive experience designing and evolving service-oriented architectures, REST APIs, asynchronous processing, and event-driven systems.\nDeep understanding of cloud-native architecture, scalability, reliability engineering, performance optimization, and modern observability practices.\nPlatform Engineering & Collaboration\nStrong experience designing and operating cloud-native applications using Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, modern observability tooling, relational and NoSQL databases, caching technologies, and messaging platforms.\nExperience building reusable platform capabilities, engineering standards, developer tooling, automation, and AI-assisted development workflows that improve engineering effectiveness across multiple teams.\nExcellent 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.\nFor the Principal-level role, in addition to the qualifications mentioned above, the following experience and skills are required:\n12+ 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. \nDemonstrated experience defining technology strategy, leading cross-team architectural initiatives, and producing written strategy and architecture documents that led to adopted decisions. \nTrack record of owning the architecture of systems where correctness has direct financial consequences, such as order management, billing, payments, royalties, or revenue systems. \nDeep practical experience with consistency in distributed and integrated systems: idempotent processing, deduplication, outbox and event-driven patterns, reconciliation, and recovery from partial failure. \nExperience 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. \nExperience integrating with enterprise systems (CRM, Finance, tax engines) and with external partners through file-based and API-based contracts. \nDemonstrated ability to define and drive reliability programs with measurable outcomes, including SLOs, operational metrics, and incident practice. \nPreferred: domain experience in publishing, digital content licensing, royalty or rights management, or revenue operations.\nWork Authorization and Sponsorship \nITHAKA 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.\nCompensation and Benefits\nAt 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...","description_format":"text","description_chars":13896,"description_truncated":true,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":12,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Continuous learning"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Professional Services","Science & Engineering","Nonprofits & Foundations","Research Institutes"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-31T00:21:35Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":3,"expected_fill_days":28,"reasons":["conf:1","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-11-03T05:54:40Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":161345,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/ithaka-principal-software-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/ithaka-principal-software-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-03T20:12:47Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2832,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-04T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":18664},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=18664"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fithaka-principal-software-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fithaka-principal-software-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fithaka-principal-software-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/ithaka-principal-software-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fithaka-principal-software-engineer"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3554893}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"ithaka.org","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3554893},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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