Senior Software Engineer (full-stack)

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.

Role

As a full‑stack Senior Software Engineer at ITHAKA, you will work on high‑impact products that help put education within everyone’s reach, including building and maintaining large‑scale, distributed web applications.

In this role you will:

• Have the freedom to leverage the right tools and languages to solve problems. Right now, we use technologies including AWS, Kubernetes, Kafka, Java, Golang, Python, TypeScript, and GitHub/GitLab.
• Develop and deploy software through an automated continuous delivery pipeline supporting over 200 production deployments a week.
• See the impact of your work as it is put in front of millions of users.
• Contribute to open source.
• Participate as an empowered member of a collaborative Agile team to design, develop, and maintain high-performance applications.
• Leverage continuous deployment and test automation tools to deploy application changes to production multiple times per day.
• Interact with internal and external customers to understand their needs and drive the development of web applications to meet those needs.
• Implement rich, interactive web applications using the latest technologies, frameworks, and patterns.
• Leverage web analytics to support product discovery and to measure project KPIs.
• Test, measure, and optimize performance using Application Performance Management tools.
• Participate in the on‑call rotation as a first point of contact for applications you own.
• Demonstrate leadership skills in mentoring team members and articulating and evangelizing new technologies, methodologies, and processes.
• Participate in analysis of pricing, risk/reward, cost advantages, and resourcing to support technological improvements.

Only candidates located in the continental United States are considered.

Experience and Skills

Required

• Minimum of 3 years of experience as a full‑stack software engineer building large-scale, distributed web applications.
• Proven experience with cloud infrastructure services—especially AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions).
• Expertise creating and operating backend services using languages such as Python, Golang, Java, or JavaScript/TypeScript with frameworks such as Fast API, NodeJS, or Spring Boot.
• Fluent in creating and operating user-facing applications using frameworks like React or Vue.
• Experience creating and managing APIs for use by multiple teams using REST or GraphQL.
• Deeply knowledgeable in using a decentralized version control system such as Git in a collaborative context on a platform like GitHub or GitLab.
• Proficient in creating and operating containerized applications, particularly in a Kubernetes environment using Docker.
• Familiarity with testing frameworks (e.g., JUnit, Jest, pytest, Playwright) and TDD practices.
• Hands‑on experience mentoring other engineers in a technical and interpersonal capacity.
• Exceptional communication, thoughtfulness, and desire to give and receive regular feedback.

Desired

• Real‑world experience building and operating LLM‑ or ML‑backed systems in production.
• Ability to evaluate and reason about LLM outputs and system behavior.
• Experience utilizing Open Search for powering ML based solutions.
• Experience with serverless and event‑driven architecture.
• Background with accessible coding practices, including semantic HTML, ARIA attributes, and keyboard navigation; experience with profiling tools to analyze and optimize application performance.
• Knowledge of cache management, content delivery, and application security at the edge using CDNs such as Fastly or CloudFront.
• Exposure to relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) or NoSQL databases (MongoDB, DynamoDB).
• Experience securing large applications against SQL injection, XSS, CSRF and other exploits.
• Established practice using Terraform or other infrastructure‑as‑code tools.
• Experience with GraphDB such as Neo4j or AWS Neptune.
• Experience leveraging AI tools such as Claude or Codex in an appropriate fashion in the SDLC.

Compensation & Benefits

The starting salary for the Senior Software Engineer position ranges from $112,240.00 to $140,300.00, varying with job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The 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.

ITHAKA is committed to providing reasonable accommodations. Contact [email protected] if you need assistance during the application or hiring process.

We are an Equal Opportunity employer. All qualified applicants receive consideration for employment without regard to identity or other status protected by law.