Lead Software Engineer, Platform Engineering

About the role

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.