Head of Infrastructure (B2C)

at  Digital Science

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?
Digital Science’s B2C Engineering team builds Overleaf and Writefull. Overleaf is a scaleup and social enterprise that builds modern collaborative authoring tools for scientists — like Google Docs for Science. Overleaf is an online, real-time collaborative editor for papers, theses and other documents written in the LaTeX markup language. Writefull is an AI-powered assistant for Overleaf and Word that helps academic authors write, paraphrase, copyedit, and more.
Overleaf and Writefull have over 19 million registered users from around the world, over 600,000 people use the platform each day, and we host over 100 million user-created projects.

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 Overleaf is 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.
This role is a management role with significant hands-on technical responsibilities.

As a team manager, your responsibilities will include:

• Line managing two senior Overleaf DevOps engineers, including career development and performance management.
• Building, maintaining and managing the delivery of the Overleaf Operations roadmap, in conjunction with the Overleaf Platform team.

As an IC and technical lead, your responsibilities will include:

• Implementing best-practices on observability, monitoring and reliability.
• Educating the wider engineering teams on best practices.
• Assisting the Operations team working on DevOps or other maintenance tasks.
• Overseeing resource usage on GCP, ensuring we are managing our costs efficiently.
• Designing and developing additional run-books, and helping transfer knowledge to other engineers, to widen the number of people who can be on-call.

This role has strong potential for progression into wider responsibility across the Digital Science Infrastructure and Operations team, which might include:

• Driving adoption of consistent standards across the Digital Science Technology organisation.
• Evangelising DevOps principles across DS Technology
• Larger management remit with other DevOps engineers from DS Technology, including potentially being a ‘manager of managers’

You will be expected to 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 significant in-depth working knowledge of cloud-computing environments, and especially Google Cloud.
• Know how to implement best-practice alerting, monitoring and observability on applications that experience high load both continuously and in spikes.
• Have an excellent track record of dealing with production incidents.
• Have a security-first mindset at all times, covering confidentiality, integrity and availability.
• Have managed engineers as a technical lead or line manager.
• Have made decisions based on operational and technical tradeoffs, then delivered the result as a team lead.

Some things that may be a bonus (but learning these on the job will be fine):

• Experience with Terraform, Kubernetes, or Prometheus.
• Database experience with Mongo, PostgreSQL, or Redis.

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.