Job Description

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 11 million registered users from around the world, over 400,000 people use our platform each day and we host over 100 million user-created projects. Our company is growing and we are looking for Software Engineers to help improve our platform.

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. We’re part of the Digital Science family of science, health and ed-tech companies.

Our Tech

Overleaf is based on open-source software, and most of our product code is open-source. You can find it on GitHub: https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf

On the backend, we run a microservices architecture, mainly in Node.js using MongoDB, PostgreSQL and Redis, running on Google Kubernetes Engine. On the front end, we mainly use React.

Your New Role

We are looking to hire a software engineer to help improve our platform. This is a complex web app that allows users to edit their scientific documents in collaboration with others, in real-time.

We are working on projects to improve our group collaboration features, which will include easier ways for groups to share projects, templates and files, and improving permissions’ management. We’re also planning to make our on-premises version easier to deploy and migrate more of our SaaS features into this product.

There will be opportunities to work on the frontend, so both backend and full-stack engineers are welcome to apply. (We also have openings for frontend engineers.)

As part of the engineering team at Overleaf, you will be helping to make Overleaf the go-to place for scientific writing.

How We Work

Overleaf is remote-first — all staff work remotely, and this is part of our values. We also have an office space in London for those that want to use it, and we get the whole team together a few times a year (usually in the UK) for face-to-face time.

Our core hours for meetings are 2pm–5pm UK time; we try to schedule all team meetings during this time, including daily 10–15 minute standup calls and biweekly company update calls.

We always collect user feedback to inform our work. We have UX professionals on our team, and we run many surveys and user interviews. Our engineers work closely with the product team in product trios (PM, engineer, UX) during both discovery and delivery of new features.

Our development process is based on the “Shape Up” model, using 6-week delivery cycles and a 4-week cooldown between them. In each cycle, we have multiple delivery tracks, each with its own tech lead. Engineers move between delivery teams each cycle. We practice code review, invest in automated testing and are big fans of linting.

How We Hire

The stages in our hiring process are typically:

1. We will aim to update you on the status of your application within 5 working days from when we receive it.
2. We’ll schedule a 30-minute call for a discussion with our Engineering Director to discuss the role and your experience, to see if they look like a good fit.
3. We’ll schedule a more in-depth interview, which is typically two hours long. The first hour is discussion, and the second hour is based on a short homework assignment (max 2h outside of interview) or an exercise during the interview if you prefer. The problems are practical in nature – no fizzbuzz, sorting linked lists or code golf.
4. We’ll make an offer. We usually interview in batches, so there may be a short delay while we interview other candidates, but we will keep you informed throughout the process.

If you have a deadline, please let us know in your application, and we will try to be accommodating.

Requirements

To do this job well you’ll need to:

• Have 2–3 years of experience working as a backend or full-stack engineer
  • Experience with the technologies we use (like node.js) helps, but you don’t need to know them all; your ability to learn is much more important to us.
• Be based in the US, Canada, the UK or Europe (EU member state)
• Usually be available in our core hours, 2pm–5pm UK time

We’re an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status. Underrepresented groups often do not apply and we encourage them even if they do not meet all the requirements.

Benefits

• Remote and flexible working.
• Salary up to £75k per year, depending on experience.
• 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 code.
• We organize company and team meetups several times a year for valuable face-to-face time.
• We’ll provide a new Mac, PC or Linux laptop, along with a stipend for other equipment.
• We provide a training budget and allocate time for training; many of our developers choose to attend relevant industry conferences or buy training materials.
• We run regular remote hackathons to keep learning and experimenting.
• We run a weekly internal seminar series with short talks from staff about their work or personal projects, new technologies and techniques.
• Additional benefits package varies by country. Please ask us.

We’re an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status. Underrepresented groups often do not apply and we encourage them even if they do not meet all the requirements.

How to Apply

Job Types: Full-Time. Job Tags: JavaScript and Node.js.

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