Senior Software Engineer - Overleaf

Department: Technology

Location: UK (Home based)

Description

About us

We are Digital Science and we 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

Overleaf is a scaleup and social enterprise that builds modern collaborative authoring tools for
scientists — like Google Docs for Science. We build an online, real-time collaborative editor for
papers, theses and other documents written in the LaTeX markup language. We have over 21
million registered users from around the world, over 700,000 people use our platform each day,
and we host over 100 million user-created projects.

Please be aware that we may close this position early if we receive a high volume of applications, so we encourage you to apply promptly.

Please also note that due to business need, we can only accept applications from candidates who live in the following locations:

• UK
• Spain
• Germany
• Romania

If you apply from outside of these areas, unfortunately your application will not be considered.

What you’ll be doing

Our backend stack is mainly Node.js, Express, MongoDB and Redis. We are 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.

Your main activities will be:

• 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.
• Write high-quality 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 practice 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.
• Participate in our support rotation. All engineers rotate through providing second-line support for our product during working hours (currently ~1 day per month).
• Write documentation and detailed pull request / commit messages.
• Understand and avoid security pitfalls. Security is important to us, and we expect everyone to be aware of secure development practices.
• Engage with our software development process, and particularly retrospectives. We hold regular retrospectives to improve our process, which is based on six-week cycles followed by a two-week wrap-up and planning period.
• Work with your engineering manager and your peers to develop your personal and professional skills. We believe strongly in creating a safe space for learning and feedback. You will have regular 1:1s with your manager to discuss progression against our career ladder.

You can optionally participate in our compensated on-call rotation once you have finished your
probation period. We have two engineers on call at all times, a primary responder and an
incident coordinator. We do not have a high number of on-call incidents: see
https://status.overleaf.com/ for our incident history.

What you’ll bring to the role

To do this job well you should:

• Have at least 5 years’ deep experience and understanding of building web applications, working with JavaScript, Node.js and React.
• Have experience with software development best practices such as version control, unit testing and continuous integration.
• Be comfortable working in a fully remote team.
• Some things that may be a bonus (but learning these on the job will be fine):
• Experience in some of the other key technologies we use (Linux, Docker, Prometheus,
• Express, MongoDB, Redis, PostgreSQL).
• Experience integrating large scale pub-sub systems such as Google Cloud Pub/Sub.

We expect you to:

• Work with us full time.
• Have strong written and verbal communication in English.
• Be available during core hours (1400 to 1700 UK time) for occasional meetings. We are not a fully distributed and asynchronous team, though we do aim to minimize meetings.

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.

Living our 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