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Papa Johns · 7 hours ago

Principal Engineer

Louisville, KY

Full-time

Hybrid

Lead/Staff

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 various channels.

Restaurants

H1B Sponsor Likely

Responsibilities

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

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

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

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

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

Qualification

Cloud platformsJava/KotlinAPI designSQLNoSQL databasesSystem designCI/CD with HarnessObservability stacksStakeholder communicationLeadershipMentorship

Required

Expertise in cloud platforms (Google Cloud Platform preferred)

Expertise in Java/Kotlin for backend services (Python/Node.js a plus)

Expertise in API design, REST/gRPC, and event-driven systems

Expertise in SQL and NoSQL databases at scale

Expertise in 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

CI/CD with Harness, Jenkins, Terraform, Helm, Kubernetes

Experience with observability stacks (AppDynamics, LaunchDarkly, Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry)

Experience with global, high-volume commerce systems

Company

Papa Johns

Glassdoor3.4

Papa Johns seeks people who have an entrepreneurial spirit and share our philosophy for success.

Founded in 1984

Atlanta, Georgia, US

10001+ employees

http://www.papajohns.com

H1B Sponsorship

Papa Johns has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)

Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship

Represents job field similar to this job

Trends of Total Sponsorships

2021 (2)