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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 seeking a Lead Software Engineer to join the WorldCat Engineering Data Access Team (DAT). This role provides hands-on technical leadership across the core platform and delivery pipelines that powers WorldCat data retrieval, record updates, authority lookups, and downstream integrations used globally by libraries and OCLC products.
Responsibilities:
- Lead the design, development, and support of core data storage APIs and pipelines for supporting real-time updates and retrieval of bibliographic content
- Provide technical leadership and mentoring to a team of engineers by guiding architecture decisions, conducting regular code reviews to ensure adherence to industry best practices and standards, and fostering a collaborative, cross-functional culture.
- Translate product and technical requirements into scalable, fault-tolerant service implementations focusing on throughput, latency, and 24×7 reliability.
- Own and evolve core services, including WorldCat Access APIs, delivery workflows, partner/customer endpoints, and orchestration logic.
- Drive modernization efforts including containerization, observability improvements, service decomposition, and cloud-ready architecture patterns.
- Collaborate with product and engineering teams to ensure end-to-end performance, alignment, and consistency across the WorldCat ecosystem.
- Improve delivery reliability and automation, reducing manual intervention through enhanced tooling, monitoring, and proactive issue detection.
- Lead cross-team engineering initiatives for new features, performance enhancements, platform integrations, and capacity planning.
- Evaluate emerging technologies that strengthen long-term architecture, maintainability, and operational health in support of OCLC’s mission
Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or related discipline, or equivalent work experience.
- Minimum of 7 years of backend or distributed systems development experience.
- Proficiency in Java, with experience in Scala or Python preferred.
- Expert-level proficiency in:
- Java, object-oriented design, distributed service patterns
- Spring Boot, Spring Framework
- Build tools, such as Maven or Gradle
- RESTful API design and implementation
- High-throughput, resilient service architecture
- Strong experience with Linux/Unix environments.
- Hands-on experience working with data access layers and service-oriented architectures.
- Strong experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing frameworks, and Git.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills with proven ability to lead and mentor engineers.
- Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.
- Experience integrating AI tools, frameworks, and concepts into the software development process.
Highly Desired Skills:
- Experience using AI-assisted development tools (Copilot, Cursor AI, etc…)
- Hands-on experience with both relational and NoSQL databases (e.g., HBase, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, MongoDB).
- Experience with big-data concepts and frameworks such as Hadoop, HBase, Spark, and Snowflake
- Knowledge around ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipelines and architectures
- Strong familiarity with observability and monitoring platforms (New Relic, Grafana, Prometheus, etc…)
- Familiarity with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), orchestration, and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
- Experience maintaining applications according to documented open standards, including both industry-wide best practices (e.g., REST, microservices architecture) and specific internal compliance guidelines, ensuring consistency and interoperability.
- Practical experience with TDD (Test Driven Development) and Agile methodologies
Working Conditions: Normal office environment. HYBRID position
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.