About us
Overleaf is a scaleup and social enterprise that builds modern collaborative authoring tools for scientists — like Google Docs for Science. We make an online, real-time collaborative editor for papers, theses and other documents written in the LaTeX markup language.
We have over 14 million registered users from around the world, over 500,000 people use our platform each day, and we host over 100 million user-created projects.
We’ve been recognised as one of the UK's top 100 fastest growing businesses and included in the FEBE Growth 100 list. We were "Best SaaS for Nonprofits or Education" in the 2020 SaaS Awards Program, and a finalist in the Digital Leaders Impact Awards 2022.
Overleaf are part of Digital Science. Digital Science are advancing the research ecosystem.
We are a pioneering technology company, and our vision is of a future where a trusted and collaborative research ecosystem drives progress for all. We believe in better, open, collaborative and inclusive research. In creating the next generation of tools and working in partnership with the community we tackle some of the biggest challenges to research. In order to achieve our vision, we need innovative, inspiring and dynamic people to join our team. Want to join us?
Your new role
We’re looking to add three engineers to our growing team. Our backend stack is mainly node.js, express, MongoDB and Redis hosted on Google Cloud Platform mainly in Google Kubernetes Engine. Our frontend stack is React with TypeScript. And we’re in large part open source (https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf). We deploy 2–6 times daily, supported by a modern cloud stack, continuous integration and a lot of automation.
Please note this role is currently only open to candidates in Germany, Spain, Romania, the Netherlands or Denmark.
What you’ll be doing
Your main activities will be:
- Write frontend and backend code, mainly in JavaScript and TypeScript.
- Write automated tests. We rely heavily on automated testing to catch regressions.
- Take your code through to production. We practise DevOps, with the support of our operations team, and expect engineers to take responsibility for getting their code out to production and making sure it is working properly.
- Participate in code review. All our changes go through GitHub pull requests with code review.
- Write documentation and detailed pull request / commit messages. We have overlap during core hours for meetings, so we are not a fully distributed / async team, but written communication is still very important in our team.
- Participate in our on-call rotation if possible. We have two engineers on call at all times, a primary responder and an incident coordinator. There is additional compensation for time on call. See https://status.overleaf.com/ for incident metrics.
- Participate in our support rotation. All engineers rotate through providing second line support for our product during working hours (currently ~1 day per month).
- Understand and avoid security pitfalls. Security is important to us, and we expect everyone to be aware of secure development practices.
- Participate in retrospectives. We hold regular retrospectives to improve our process. Currently, we run a variation of the ShapeUp process from BaseCamp, modified based on previous retrospectives.
- Work with your engineering manager and your peers to develop your personal and professional skills. You will have regular 1:1s with your manager to discuss progression against our career ladder. We believe strongly in creating a safe space for learning and feedback.
- Work with product managers and UX researchers to provide technical input on new development. Our engineering and product teams work together closely to make sure we are building the right thing and building it right.
Some specific things you might be working on:
- Overleaf will be implementing its first AI feature. The project does not require any specific AI skills, because we will be using a vendor. However, experience with or interest in AI will certainly be helpful.
- Overleaf is working toward a major new feature, which is highly requested among users: offline editing. This is a large technical project touching many areas of the backend and the frontend. Our intention is to start building a Progressive Web Application (PWA).
What you’ll bring to the role
To do this job well you will:
- Have at least 5 years’ experience in software development.
- Have deep experience and understanding of building web applications. Experience in some of the key technologies we use (Linux, Docker, Prometheus, node.js with JavaScript, express.js, MongoDB, Redis, PostgreSQL, TypeScript, React) is of course a plus, but learning these on the job is also fine.
- Be comfortable working in a fully remote team.
Some things that may be a bonus:
- Experience or interest in working with AI and its applicability to Overleaf.
- Experience developing Progressive Web Applications (PWAs).
We expect you to:
- Work with us full time; this is a full time role.
- Have strong written and verbal communication in English.
Not sure you meet all qualifications? Let us decide! Research shows that women and members of other under-represented groups tend to not apply to jobs when they think they may not meet every qualification, when in fact, they often do! We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment and strongly encourage you to apply.
Benefits
- Remote and flexible working.
- You would join a small, dedicated and growing team.
- We're substantially (around 80%) open source, so your work will often be on open source.
- We're backed by Bethnal Green Ventures (bethnalgreenventures.com) and Digital Science (www.digital-science.com), through which we're part of a wider community of startups in science, health and ed-tech.
- We'll provide a new Mac, Windows or Linux laptop, along with a stipend for other equipment.
- We provide a training budget; many of our staff choose to attend relevant industry conferences or buy training materials.
- We run two biweekly internal seminar series (‘Show and Tell’ and ‘Wisdom Wednesdays’) with short talks from staff about their work or personal projects, new technologies and techniques
Our vision and values
We invest in, nurture and support innovative businesses and technologies that make all parts of the research process more open, efficient and effective.
The talent we secure is fundamental to us achieving our vision and our growth plans. The values we live by are:
We are brave in the pursuit of better
We are collaborative and inclusive
We are always open-minded
We are from and for the community
We're an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.
About Digital Science
Digital Science is a technology company working to make research more efficient.
We invest in, nurture and support innovative businesses and technologies that make all parts of the research process more open and effective.
Our portfolio includes admired brands including Altmetric, Anywhere Access, Dimensions, Figshare, ReadCube, Symplectic, IFI Claims, GRID, Ripeta, Writefull, Gigantum and Overleaf.
We believe that together, we can help researchers make a difference.
