Senior Software Engineer, JSTOR Stewardship

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.

Level

Depending on experience and qualifications, ITHAKA is open to considering candidates in the following levels:

Mid-Level, Software Engineer:

• Expected to bring strong technical skills and adaptability, with opportunities to grow into leadership or more autonomous roles.
• Focuses on hands‑on contributions and learning through collaboration on challenging projects.
• 2 + years of experience

Senior-level, Senior Software Engineer:

• Expected to lead with a high degree of autonomy, taking ownership of complex initiatives and driving innovation.
• Will mentor junior engineers, contributing to their growth and the team’s overall expertise.
• Plays a key role in shaping strategic goals and optimizing workflows for scalability and impact.
• 5+ year of experience

The Role

ITHAKA is looking for a Mid/Senior Software Engineer (Frontend Focus) to join the JSTOR Stewardship team.

In this role, you’ll build modern, user‑centered web applications that help millions of learners, educators, and librarians discover and engage with JSTOR content. While your primary expertise will be frontend engineering, you’ll lead complex technical initiatives across multiple features or systems, owning work from discovery and technical design through deployment, experimentation, and production operations.

You’ll work in a cross‑functional product team alongside Product, Design, User Research, Data Science, and Engineering to solve meaningful user problems, deliver intuitive and accessible experiences, and continuously improve our products through experimentation, analytics, and AI‑assisted capabilities. As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll combine strong technical execution with product thinking—using user insights, experimentation, and engineering judgment to help shape solutions that deliver meaningful customer and business outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, test, deploy, monitor, and maintain production‑grade web applications.
• Develop intuitive, performant, reliable, and accessible user interfaces with a strong focus on user experience.
• Build and integrate APIs and backend services to deliver end‑to‑end product experiences.
• Instrument applications for analytics, experimentation, and observability that enable data‑informed product decisions.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Design, User Research, Data Science, and Engineering to identify user problems, validate solutions, and iterate based on evidence.
• Contribute to technical documentation and design artifacts that help the team share knowledge and communicate architectural decisions.
• Use product, operational, and engineering metrics to evaluate technical decisions and continuously improve product quality and engineering effectiveness.
• Participate in an on‑call rotation supporting production systems.

• Occasional travel, comprising less than 10% of the time, may be necessary, with a primary focus on visits to our Michigan and New York offices.

Additional responsibilities for senior level include:

• Provide hands‑on technical leadership for complex initiatives, from discovery through production, partnering with Product and Design to balance user needs, business goals, and engineering tradeoffs.
• Guide technical design and architecture decisions within the team’s product area to improve scalability, maintainability, reliability, and developer experience.
• Identify technical debt,…