Principal Engineer

Location: Dublin, OH / Hybrid

Time Type: Full time

Job Description

Why join OCLC? 

OCLC is consistently recognized as a best place to work by several independent programs. We recognize and reward people and results with a comprehensive Total Rewards package. This means competitive compensation that reflects your unique contributions—performance, experience, and skills—along with exceptional benefits, including best-in-class health coverage, retirement plans with generous company contributions, and a commitment to your overall well-being.

• We know the best ideas don’t always happen at a desk. Take a walking meeting around our 100-acre campus or enjoy lunch on the patio. We’re committed to your success—both personally and professionally. Hybrid work environment: For many roles, three days a week on-site, with occasional additional days based on business needs. 

• Free use of our on-site fitness center, gym sports, group exercise classes, and game room 

• Onsite catering and cafeteria subsidized by OCLC 

• Health and wellness events 

• Work environments with individual and team spaces and the latest technology tools 

• Paid parental leave and adoption assistance 

• Tuition reimbursement and Public Service Loan Forgiveness eligibility 

• Company-subsidized pricing on local tickets and memberships 

Join us in transforming how people everywhere access information and be part of a mission-driven team that makes a global impact. 

The job details are as follows:

OCLC is revitalizing a flagship SaaS offering, and we're looking for engineers eager to solve complex, real-world problems. Our global platform serves users and institutions alike, preserving and sharing cultural heritage for current and future generations. This is an extraordinary opportunity to do work that matters in a product with complex technical needs.
Challenges include optimizing content delivery speed and scalability for a platform that serves millions of requests a day. Complex metadata management, linked data integrations, and asset processing pipelines await on the backend. Bridging both front and backend are complex search and discovery needs. Delivering on all of these from reliable, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure will be a hurdle, but also an opportunity to innovate, grow, and demonstrate leadership.

If you're motivated to work on rewarding technical challenges in support of libraries around the world, we'd love to hear from you. Bring your curiosity, your problem-solving, and your drive to build great things in the cloud. Together, we'll make an impact.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement complex features and systems.
• Provide technical guidance and expertise to the team.
• Participate in architectural discussions and decisions.
• Conduct code reviews and ensure code quality standards
• Mentor junior engineers

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or related discipline, or equivalent work experience.
• 10+ years of software development experience.
• Python: Strong to expert proficiency in Python 3.11+, especially for web-development. Must be familiar with modern python idioms, type hinting, dataclasses, threading constraints and multi-process architecture.
• Django: Strong proficiency with the Django web framework, with an understanding of Django’s architecture, ORM, and templating engines. Familiarity with Django Ninja and Pydantic frameworks strongly preferred. Experience with similar frameworks such as Flask may be suitable.
• API Design: Experience translating product and UI requirements into effective, performant, secure APIs. OpenAPI specification design strongly preferred. Familiarity with OpenAPI specs from Pydantic a plus.
• PostgreSQL: Proficiency with JSON fields, full-text search, and complex constraints. Experienced optimizing queries and interfacing ORM with database tables for high scale, high performance applications.

• Ability to lead and mentor teams.
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Deep understanding of database systems.
• Experience with cloud platforms.
• Experience with distributed systems and microservices architecture.
• Experience integrating AI tools, frameworks, and concepts into the software development process.

Working Conditions: Normal office environment.

ADA/EAA: The above statements cover what are generally believed to be the principal and essential functions of this job. Specific circumstances may allow or require some people assigned to the job to perform a somewhat different combination of duties.