What are the responsibilities and job description for the Staff Engineer position at Papa Johns?
Job Summary
The Staff Engineer, Store/Digital serves as a strategic technical leader with broad influence across multiple product teams. In addition to guiding software design, development, and lifecycle management, the Staff Engineer drives cross-team collaboration, sets technical direction, and ensures alignment with organizational objectives. This role requires a system-level perspective to anticipate and address engineering challenges, reduce technical risk, and elevate engineering effectiveness at scale. The Staff Engineer partners with engineers, architects, vendors, and the open-source community to deliver innovative solutions that enhance customer experience and organizational outcomes.
Duties and Responsibilities (other duties as assigned)
Provide technical leadership across multiple teams, fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing to achieve unified outcomes.
Apply system-level thinking to identify and resolve architectural challenges, ensuring scalable and resilient solutions.
Proactively assess and mitigate technical risks, supporting the organization in delivering reliable products and services.
Champion engineering effectiveness by implementing best practices, optimizing workflows, and mentoring engineers to enhance productivity and quality.
Build rapid prototypes to explore viability of solutions fit to product strategy and upon alignment from stakeholders scale the solution and productionize it
Identifies, implements, and shares technical solutions that can be used across the organization
Identifies unsecured code areas and implements fixes as they are discovered
Identifies product enhancements (client-facing or technical) to create a better experience for the end users
Collaborates with Enterprise Architects and with Chief Architecture Owners and creates meaningful architecture diagrams and other documentation needed for security reviews or other interested parties
Defines service level objectives for product to constantly measure their reliability in production and help prioritize backlog work
Writes custom code or scripts to automate infrastructure, monitoring services, and test cases also to do “destructive testing” to ensure adequate resiliency in production
Creates meaningful dashboards, logging, alerting, and responses to ensure that issues are captured and addressed proactively
Education, Experience & Certifications
6 plus years of hands-on software development experience in either iOS or Android platforms
Mastery of programming languages like Swift, Kotlin, Android, and Java
4 years of experience mentoring and giving work direction to Developers
Experience with distributing mobile applications via public App stores and/or Enterprise channels
Functional Skills
Analytical Skills: effectively uses data to generate insights
Planning & Prioritization: highest impact, highest value
Financial & Business Acumen
Communicates Effectively and Candidly
Problem Solving; ability to use rigorous logic to solve problems with innovative effective solutions
Process Improvement: Strive to continually improve
Ability to build and leverage talent
Ability to work in a challenging, fast-paced environment and to adapt to new situations as they arise
Ability to effectively communicate, inform, and influence senior leaders
Ability to work cross-functionality on multiple initiatives with a successful record of advancing projects
Our Values
EVERYONE BELONGS - We believe connectedness and belonging are the essential ingredients to our success
DO THE RIGHT THING - We are relentlessly focused on quality and integrity and make the right choices, even when it's difficult
PEOPLE FIRST - To craft positive experiences for our customers, we take care of each other first
INNOVATE TO WIN - We champion and challenge for a better way in all we do
HAVE FUN - We find joy, create meaningful impact and celebrate the journey together
Our Core Competencies
CUSTOMER CENTRIC - We leverage data and insights to craft a customer experience that builds relationships, cultivates trust, and delivers excellence
RESULTS DRIVEN – We focus on measurable outcomes by remaining optimistic, tenacious, and persistent even in the face of challenges
CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT - We champion for better through strategic risk taking, experimentation and challenging the status quo
BIAS FOR ACTION - We courageously lead, drive towards decisions, and maintain agility to meet the demands of our dynamic industry
WINNING TOGETHER - We work together to unlock our full potential by actively collaborating and contributing in a cross-functional capacity
Papa Johns is an equal opportunity employer.
Papa Johns is a federal contractor that participates in the E-Verify program to confirm employment eligibility for each new team member. We also comply with all Right to Work requirements. Official E-Verify and Right to Work notices are available for applicants to review in both English and Spanish.