Together we make breakthroughs possible.
At OCLC, we build technology with a purpose: to connect libraries and make knowledge accessible worldwide, because we believe that what is known must be shared. Our teams work with complex global datasets, AI and machine learning, hybrid cloud solutions, and other technologies that connect people and organizations to the information they need. We value the power of unique perspectives and experiences to unlock innovation. At OCLC, your ideas matter, whether you have two years of experience or 20. You’ll learn, create, and problem-solve with technologists, product developers, librarians, researchers, marketing pros, and support teams around the world.
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.
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:
The WorldCat Entities team is seeking a hands-on Engineering Manager to guide a growing team of software engineers. This is a player-coach role where you’ll spend ~30–50% of your time designing and building software, and the remainder coaching engineers, driving delivery, and ensuring operational excellence. The ideal candidate is a strong coder with deep system design experience who can lead through influence, set technical direction, and help the team ship reliably in a modern cloud-native environment.
Major Responsibilities:
- Lead a self-managed team delivering a greenfield platform for WorldCat Entities and related linked data applications; partner closely with Product and stakeholders to define outcomes, milestones, and delivery plans.
- Drive architecture and technical direction for high-scale services supporting entity creation, enrichment, reconciliation, and search/discovery use cases.
- Contribute hands-on through design docs, technical spikes, PRs, code reviews, pairing, and occasionally owning end-to-end features.
- Ensure production readiness: SLAs, monitoring/alerting, incident response, disaster recovery practices, and operational documentation for 24/7 services.
- Guide data pipeline and integration work with external/internal sources (e.g., authority feeds), including automation, data quality, and repeatable refresh processes.
- Lead modern API and service design (REST and event-driven patterns where appropriate), with attention to performance, accessibility, and backward compatibility.
- Establish and evolve engineering practices: CI/CD, automated testing, secure-by-default development, release hygiene, and dependency/vulnerability management.
- Coach and develop engineers via feedback, mentoring, and growth plans; foster strong team norms around ownership, code quality, and pragmatic decision-making.
- Coordinate cross-team technical work (platform, security, infrastructure, and partner teams) and communicate tradeoffs, risks, and progress to senior leadership.
Minimum Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
- 7+ years of professional software development experience, including 3+ years in a technical leadership role (engineering manager, tech lead, or player-coach).
- Strong coding ability and system design depth; demonstrated experience building and operating distributed services in production.
- Experience with Java/Spring Boot services and modern cloud-native deployment patterns (containers, microservices).
- Strong knowledge of AWS and container orchestration (EKS/ECS), plus production operations (observability, on-call readiness, incident management).
- Experience with search technologies (OpenSearch/Elasticsearch) and relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL/Aurora/RDS), including performance tuning and migration/upgrade planning.
- Familiarity with API gateways/service routing and designing stable, consumer-friendly APIs.
- Strong understanding of CI/CD and automated testing strategies in an iterative delivery environment.
- Excellent communication skills: able to explain architecture, risks, and tradeoffs to engineers, product partners, and senior stakeholders.
- Experience with Agile delivery and leading teams through iterative planning and execution.
Desired Qualifications:
- Experience with knowledge graph implementations and graph technologies, such as designing/operating graph-based data models and services using RDF triple stores and/or property graph databases (e.g., Neptune, Blazegraph, GraphDB, Neo4j), including query languages (SPARQL/Gremlin/Cypher) and graph indexing/performance considerations.
- Experience with linked data / semantic web concepts (RDF, BIBFRAME, authority data, entity resolution) or adjacent data-centric domains.
- Experience designing data ingestion/enrichment pipelines and automation for recurring refreshes.
- Familiarity with accessibility considerations for web applications and platform UI integrations.
- Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform or equivalent).
Working Conditions: Normal office environment.
ADA/EAA: The above statements cover what are generally believed to be 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.
