Principal Backend Architect – Books & Royalties Platform

TrulyHired; United States; On-site; USD 129,000 - 186,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental coverage

Vision plans

Retirement contribution

Parental leave

Paid time off

Paid holidays

Sick days

Wellness benefits

Job summary

ITHAKA seeks a Lead/Principal Software Engineer to shape the technology vision for JSTOR's Books and Royalty Payments backend. You will lead architecture while remaining a hands‑on contributor, steering APIs, data pipelines, and platform health across multiple teams.

You will mentor engineers, drive AI-assisted development practices, and align backend strategy with product goals, delivering scalable, reliable experiences for JSTOR users worldwide.

Qualifications

• Experience designing distributed backend systems in production.
• Ability to define technology strategy and lead cross‑team architectural initiatives.
• Experience balancing hands-on engineering with long‑term platform evolution.
• Strong product thinking connecting backend strategy to user needs and business goals.
• Excellent communication and collaboration across engineering, product, and executives.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the multi‑year backend technology strategy and architectural roadmap.
• Lead architectural decisions across multiple teams with influence and collaboration.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and translate into practical, scalable solutions.
• Drive reliability, observability, and platform health metrics.
• Mentor engineers and engineers leaders to raise technical capability across teams.

Skills

Distributed systems design

Cross-team leadership

Backend architecture

Product thinking

Tools

Java

Spring Boot

Maven

MySQL

Redis

Job description

ITHAKA seeks a Lead/Principal Software Engineer to shape the technology vision for JSTOR's Books and Royalty Payments backend. You will lead architecture while remaining a hands‑on contributor, steering APIs, data pipelines, and platform health across multiple teams.

You will mentor engineers, drive AI-assisted development practices, and align backend strategy with product goals, delivering scalable, reliable experiences for JSTOR users worldwide.