Lead Software Engineer, Platform Engineering

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. The Role 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. This role sits on the Technology Enabling Services team and combines full-stack product engineering with DevOps and platform enablement, with a strong emphasis on developer experience, usability, and operational excellence. You will design, build, and operate internal platforms, tools, and services that empower engineering teams to deliver high-quality software faster and more safely. This includes hands-on development of backend services, CI/CD and automation capabilities, and intuitive user-facing interfaces and internal web applications. Your work will directly influence how developers interact with our platforms and how effectively teams ship and maintain software. This is a highly collaborative role for a senior engineer who enjoys building production systems, mentoring others, shaping engineering practices, and acting as a force multiplier across teams. Responsibilities Architect, develop, and maintain internal platforms, services, and tooling that support CI/CD, automation, and software delivery. Drive the product life cycle of the development platform including CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategies, platform automation, and productivity tooling. Understand developer needs, and apply DevOps and enablement methodologies to improve development velocity, reliability, quality, and operational efficiency through paved paths. Partner closely with product, platform, and application engineering teams to improve developer workflows and platform usability. Champion developer experience by ensuring 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. Practice strong portfolio management, including assessing, prototyping, trialing, implementing, and sunsetting technologies as fit for purpose. Collaborate to develop internal platform roadmaps and help translate organizational goals into actionable technical initiatives. Operate with a “You Build It, You Own It” mindset, taking shared responsibility for the reliability, maintainability, security, and evolution of the code you help put into 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 the way it is used. Experience and Skills We do not expect any single candidate to have deep expertise across all of these areas. We are looking for engineers who value continuous improvement and who focus on building clear, reliable, and maintainable systems. ITHAKA is committed to onboarding, mentorship, and continuous learning, and you will have support as you grow into new technologies and domains. A minimum of 8 years as a full-stack software engineer delivering large-scale, distributed web applications. Able to act as a strategic product thinker and community builder Proven ability to design and develop scalable backend services and RESTful APIs. Hands-on development of user-facing or internal web applications using modern frontend frameworks (e.g., React, 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 working with AWS (e.g., EC2, S3, Lambda, RDS, 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, with the ability to clearly articulate technical concepts, designs, and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Compensation & Benefits At ITHAKA we believe in openness and equity. 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 Software Engineer position ranges from $145,000 - $160,000. 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 paid holidays, up to 12 sick days, wellness benefits, and more. Please note that ITHAKA, at its discretion, may make changes to its benefits programs from time to time. Work for ITHAKA We are committed to our organizational values of belonging, evidence, speed, teamwork, and trust. We take seriously the need for everyone to feel welcome. Belonging is one of our core values, and it shows in our vibrant culture. People from a wide range of backgrounds work at ITHAKA, and we believe that unique perspectives help us realize new insights and build better solutions. We want to work with people who are passionate about ideas like these and who wish to contribute their perspectives and talents to ITHAKA’s mission. We enthusiastically welcome applications from people of all backgrounds and credentials. We want to hear your story and include your perspective in the transformative work we aim to do. Learn more about Working at ITHAKA. Apply Now Although ITHAKA has physical offices in New York and Ann Arbor, Michigan, our employees are distributed across the continental United States. At this time, we’re not considering candidates who are unable to work and reside in the continental U.S. Candidates may apply by submitting an application online through our career site, if you have any questions about your application, please contact us at [email protected]. ITHAKA is committed to providing reasonable accommodations, if there’s anything we can do to accommodate any portion of the application or hiring process, please contact us at [email protected]. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity employer. All qualified applicants receive consideration for employment without regard to identity or other status protected by law. We invite you to read our Equal Employment Opportunity Statement. ITHAKA cares about your privacy, learn more about our Applicant Privacy Notice.