Senior Full-Stack Engineer

at  Digital Science

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 18 million registered users from around the world, over 600,000 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 is 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?

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. As a specific example of a project you might be working on, we have plans to make our premium plans and feature subscriptions more flexible and easier to access for users who wouldn’t be able to get them otherwise.
• 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 with billing and subscription technologies like Stripe or Recurly.

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.

Benefits

• Remote and flexible working.
• 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.
• At least once a year, we meet in-person at an expenses-paid company or departmental retreat. In 2024 we have been to Malaga (Spain) and Oxford (UK).
• We’re substantially open source, and your work will often be released as open source code.
• 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.
• If you’re in the UK and in or near London, our well-equipped office space is available for your use, and shared with several other group companies.