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:
o Cloud platforms (Google Cloud Platform preferred).
o Java/Kotlin for backend services (Python/Node.js a plus).
o API design, REST/gRPC, and event-driven systems.
o SQL and NoSQL databases at scale.
o 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 in:
o CI/CD with Harness, Jenkins, Terraform, Helm, Kubernetes.
o Experience with observability stacks (AppDynamics, LaunchDarkly, Grafana,
Prometheus, OpenTelemetry).
o 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 – You manage expectations transparently,
maintain trust, and communicate clearly with product, business, and technical
partners.
• Successful Value Delivery – Teams consistently deliver functionality on time,
meeting or exceeding quality standards with scalable, reliable systems that solve business needs.
• High Team Morale and Engagement – Engineers are motivated, engaged, and
confident, with low turnover and high satisfaction that directly fuels successful
delivery.
• Capability-wide Consistency and Quality – Shared tools, design patterns, and
secure practices are adopted across teams, creating modern, maintainable
systems.
• Accelerated Decision-Making – Teams move quickly thanks to established
patterns and a clear rationale for decisions.
• Proactive Issue Surfacing – Potential risks or gaps are raised early with actionable solutions, preventing surprises and strengthening delivery confidence.
• Team Growth and Connection – Developers feel part of a larger craft, benefiting from cross-team learning and contributing back into the community.
• Trusted Voice Across Domains – Your input is sought because it’s useful,
pragmatic, and consistently adds value to delivery outcomes.
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 – Product or business leaders stop relying on your input due to unmet or mismanaged expectations.
• Fragmented Vision – The domain drifts from target-state architecture, creating siloed, inconsistent solutions that drive long-term cost and complexity.
• Quality Erodes – Code reviews become rubber stamps, test coverage drops, tech debt piles up, and defects increase — leading to unstable or undeliverable systems.
• Team Disengagement – Engineers lack confidence or direction, feel isolated, or disengage due to absent, indecisive, or overly controlling leadership.
• Isolation from Partners – Lack of collaboration with architects, security, data, or platform teams results in late-stage rework, integration failures, or security gaps.
• Becoming a Bottleneck – Knowledge or decisions are hoarded, gating flow of work (becoming a “Brent” from The Phoenix Project).
• Inconsistent Practices Across Teams – Each team reinvents the wheel,
duplicating effort and weakening systems through fragmented approaches.
• Dogma Over Pragmatism – Guidance is rigid and disconnected from real-world delivery, leading teams to bypass or resist the community of practice.
• Lack of Cross-Team Visibility – Critical issues (e.g., performance bottlenecks,
accessibility, or security) surface late instead of being identified proactively.
• Disconnected Community – Developers feel isolated, with little shared craft or
contribution beyond their immediate team.
• Erosion of Trust – Product and technical stakeholders stop seeking your input
because it lacks relevance, timeliness, or alignment with business goals