Principal Software Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Spearhead the technological vision for JSTOR’s Business platform team focusing on Books and Royalty Payments.

• Define and enhance the backend architecture, distributed systems, search platform, APIs, data pipelines, and engineering methodologies.

• Develop and advance a multi-year backend technology strategy and architectural roadmap.

• Guide architectural decisions across various engineering teams through influence and technical leadership.

• Assess emerging technologies in the realms of backend, AI, and distributed systems.

• Design, create, and optimize highly available ordering and digital book fulfillment systems.

• Promote practical applications of AI within engineering and operational processes.

• Establish strategies for analytics, experimentation, observability, service reliability, and platform operations.

• Define metrics for engineering health and measures of platform success.

• Create reusable services, frameworks, tools, platform capabilities, and engineering practices.

• Mentor engineers and technical leaders.

• Lead the documentation of architecture, technical decision records, and engineering guidance.

• Collaborate with Product, AI, External Partners, Data Science, and Platform Engineering teams.

• For the Principal level: take ownership of the technical integrity of ordering, fulfillment, invoicing, and royalty payment processes; establish reliability standards; oversee integrations; communicate strategy and represent the platform in architectural forums.

⛳️ Requirements

• A minimum of 12 years of experience in designing, constructing, and operating large-scale distributed systems for the Principal-level role.

• Proven experience in designing, building, and managing distributed backend systems in a production environment.

• Experience in defining technology strategies and leading cross-team architectural initiatives.

• Ability to balance hands-on engineering with long-term architecture, platform evolution, product strategy, and organizational priorities.

• Strong product insight that connects backend and search strategies to user requirements, business objectives, product outcomes, and measurable impacts.

• Extensive expertise in building distributed backend systems using Java or Python.

• Significant experience with service-oriented architectures, REST APIs, asynchronous processing, and event-driven systems.

• Profound understanding of cloud-native architecture, scalability, reliability engineering, performance optimization, and modern observability practices.

• Familiarity with Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, observability tools, relational and NoSQL databases, caching technologies, and messaging platforms.

• Experience in creating reusable platform capabilities, engineering standards, developer tools, automation, and AI-assisted development workflows.

• Excellent communication and collaboration abilities.

• For the Principal level: experience with financially significant systems; idempotent processing, deduplication, outbox and event-driven patterns, reconciliation, and partial-failure recovery; production platform evolution; CRM, Finance, tax engine, and external partner integrations; reliability programs with SLOs, operational metrics, and incident practices.

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

• Must be eligible to work and reside in the continental United States.

• Must not require immigration sponsorship or additional/permanent work authorization to work in the United States.

🏝️ 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 paid sick days.

• Wellness benefits.