Lead Software Engineer, Platform Engineering
About The Position
ITHAKA is seeking a Lead Software Engineer, Platform Engineering (Full-Stack) to advance how software is built, delivered, and experienced across the product engineering organization. The role is part of the Technology Enabling Services team and combines full-stack product engineering with DevOps and platform enablement, emphasizing developer experience, usability, and operational excellence. The engineer will design, build, and operate internal platforms, tools, and services that help engineering teams deliver high-quality software more quickly and safely. The work includes backend services, CI/CD and automation capabilities, and intuitive user-facing interfaces and internal web applications. The role influences how developers interact with platforms and how effectively teams ship and maintain software. It is a collaborative senior engineering position involving production systems, mentoring, shaping engineering practices, and enabling teams across the organization. ITHAKA’s mission is to expand access to knowledge and education around the world through JSTOR, Portico, and Ithaka S+R. Employees are expected to contribute to a culture where everyone can thrive and to the organizational values of belonging, evidence, speed, teamwork, and trust. The position is open to candidates able to work and reside in the continental United States.
Requirements
- At least 8 years of experience as a full-stack software engineer delivering large-scale, distributed web applications.
- Ability to act as a strategic product thinker and community builder.
- Proven ability to design and develop scalable backend services and RESTful APIs.
- Hands-on experience developing user-facing or internal web applications with modern frontend frameworks such as React or Vue, informed by UI/UX and accessibility best practices.
- Working knowledge of CI/CD concepts, automation, and software delivery pipelines, including tools such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar.
- Practical expertise contributing to or operating internal developer platforms, enablement tooling, or shared services.
- Strong experience with AWS, including examples such as EC2, S3, Lambda, RDS, and EKS, and deploying applications using Docker and Kubernetes.
- Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code technologies such as Terraform.
- Experience with event-driven architectures and messaging systems.
- Demonstrated ability to troubleshoot, debug, and optimize performance across the stack.
- Comfort collaborating in Agile, cross-functional, and distributed or self-directed teams.
- Strong communication skills and ability to explain technical concepts, designs, and trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Responsibilities
- Architect, develop, and maintain internal platforms, services, and tooling that support CI/CD, automation, and software delivery.
- Drive the development platform product life cycle, including CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategies, platform automation, and productivity tooling.
- Understand developer needs and apply DevOps and enablement methods to improve development velocity, reliability, quality, and operational efficiency through paved paths.
- Partner with product, platform, and application engineering teams to improve developer workflows and platform usability.
- Ensure enablement tools are intuitive, accessible, well-documented, and aligned with user needs.
- Mentor and coach engineers across teams on architecture, coding standards, DevOps practices, and UI/UX considerations.
- Facilitate technical deep dives, design reviews, and training sessions to promote shared learning and best practices.
- Assess, prototype, trial, implement, and sunset technologies as appropriate through strong portfolio management.
- Collaborate on internal platform roadmaps and translate organizational goals into actionable technical initiatives.
- Take shared responsibility for the reliability, maintainability, security, and evolution of code released to production.
- Participate in incident response, production support, troubleshooting, and follow-up remediation.
- Improve practices for availability, alerting, performance, capacity, cost, recovery, and technical debt.
- Turn operational learning into improvements to the platform and how it is used.
Benefits
- 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 sick days.
- Wellness benefits.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
