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 No
  
  SQL 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 (App Dynamics, Launch Darkly, Grafana, Prometheus, Open Telemetry).
• Experience with global, high-volume commerce systems.

What Success Looks Like

At Papa Johns, we believe delivery…