Principal Engineer

Job Summary Papa Johns is seeking a Principal Backend Engineer to drive the architecture and engineering excellence of our omnichannel digital commerce platforms. In this role, you’ll set the vision for building cloud-native, resilient, and scalable services and APIs that power millions of customer interactions across web, mobile, aggregators, call-centers, and instore channels. This position blends hands-on backend engineering with strategic technical leadership. You’ll partner closely with product, architecture, and platform teams to design high-performance systems, guide domain technical direction, and shape enterprise-wide best practices—while staying close to the codebase yourself. What You’ll Do Architectural & Technical Leadership Define and evolve the backend architecture for Papa Johns global ordering and commerce services. Partner with product, QE, and business analysis leads to ensure requirements are technically sound and aligned with long-term target states. Act as a solution architect within the domain, collaborating with enterprise and principal architects to guide strategic design decisions. Lead adoption of microservices, API-first design, and event-driven systems using GCP (Pub/Sub, etc.). Contribute directly to delivery (50–70% hands-on coding, design, and reviews), while advocating for continuous tech debt remediation (~15% of capacity). Ensure the technical feasibility of UI/UX designs and uphold high engineering standards across teams. Engineering Excellence & Shared Practices Champion CI/CD pipelines with Harness (and Jenkins) to improve release velocity and reliability. Lead design and code reviews that emphasize testability, performance, and maintainability—guiding rather than gating contributions. Create and maintain shared resources such as design patterns, starter kits, testing strategies, and documentation to enable consistency across teams. Identify fragmentation, duplication, or misalignment across services and collaborate with engineering and architecture partners to resolve them. Drive shared metrics and visibility into performance, accessibility, code health, and service resilience. Mentorship & Influence Pair with engineers and stay engaged in the codebase to maintain an accurate view of the systems you guide. Coach and mentor engineers across domains, spotting skill gaps and growth opportunities while fostering a culture of ownership and technical excellence. Establish and facilitate rituals (brown bags, demo days, peer reviews) that encourage cross-team knowledge sharing and alignment. Provide leadership in difficult technical decisions, ensuring healthy autonomy while keeping teams aligned to the broader strategy. Cross-Functional Collaboration Work with product and UX partners to translate customer needs into robust backend solutions. Partner with enterprise functions (Architecture, Security, Data Engineering, Platform Engineering) to ensure scalable, secure, and performant solutions. Clearly communicate complex backend architecture and technical decisions to technical and non-technical stakeholders alike. Reliability & Innovation Define and enforce SLOs/SLIs for backend services, leading performance tuning, fault tolerance, and resiliency engineering. Own incident response strategy for critical backend systems. Evaluate and prototype emerging technologies, frameworks, and practices—scaling successful approaches across the organization. What We’re Looking For Expertise in: Cloud platforms (Google Cloud Platform preferred), Java/Kotlin for backend services (Python/Node.js a plus), API design, REST/gRPC, and event-driven systems, SQL and NoSQL databases at scale, System design, security, and performance optimization. Strong leadership, mentorship, and stakeholder communication skills. Proven delivery of large-scale, backend-intensive systems (e-commerce or high volume transactions a plus). Preferred Qualifications CI/CD with Harness, Jenkins, Terraform, Helm, Kubernetes. Experience with observability stacks (AppDynamics, LaunchDarkly, Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry). Experience with global, high-volume commerce systems. What Success Looks Like At Papa Johns, we believe delivery heals everything — most fractured relationships in technology stem from poor cadence or mismanaged expectations. As a Principal Engineer, success in both Domain Tech Leadership and Community of Practice Leadership is reflected in: Effective Stakeholder Management, Successful Value Delivery, High Team Morale and Engagement, Capability-wide Consistency and Quality, Accelerated Decision-Making, Proactive Issue Surfacing, Team Growth and Connection, and Trusted Voice Across Domains. What Failure Looks Like While success can feel nuanced, failure is usually obvious. Principal Engineers fall short in their domain or practice leadership when: Stakeholders Lose Trust, Fragmented Vision, Quality Erodes, Team Disengagement, Isolation from Partners, Becoming a Bottleneck, Inconsistent Practices Across Teams, Dogma Over Pragmatism, Lack of Cross-Team Visibility, Disconnected Community, and Erosion of Trust. Papa John’s is an equal employment opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age, marital status or civil partnership, national or ethnic origin, pregnancy or maternity, veteran status, uniformed service, protected disability status, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender reassignment, or gender expression.

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