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.

• 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,