About Us

Overleaf is a startup and social enterprise that builds modern collaborative authoring tools for scientists — like Google Docs for Science. We have over eight million registered users from around the world and over 400,000 people use our platform each day. Our primary product is an online, real-time collaborative editor for papers, theses, technical reports and other documents written in the LaTeX markup language.

Overleaf was founded by two mathematicians who were inspired by their own experiences in academia to create a better solution for scientific collaboration and communication. Now we are a team of about fifty with fifteen engineers. We were recently recognised as one of the UK’s top 100 fastest growing businesses and as the Best SaaS for Nonprofits or Education in the 2020 SaaS Awards Program.

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

Your New Role

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

Your role will involve helping us to run and maintain our microservice infrastructure, debug live problems, improve security and adopt new technologies and best practices (such as continuous deployment). You will also be looking into live issues if they occur, and helping to diagnose and fix problems in production.

We have an on-call rota for production issues out-of-ours which would require you to be available at certain times. This is flexible and usually covers 1-2 days per week, for which there is compensation. You would not be required to work additional hours for this.

Most of your time will be spent working with Docker, Google Kubernetes Engine and Terraform on Google Cloud Platform, but you may also write or modify tools written in JavaScript or Ruby.

Most of our microservices are written in Node.js using MongoDB, PostgreSQL and Redis.

Overleaf is based on open-source software, and most of our product code is itself open source. You can find it on GitHub.

As a member of the Engineering team at Overleaf, you will be helping to make Overleaf the place where scientists, researchers and academics go to do their best work.

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 when the pandemic settles down we’ll again get the whole team together in London a few times a year 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.

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 7 working days from when we receive it.
2. We’ll follow up by email with any questions we have about your application, usually around logistics, your ambitions and your expectations about the role.
3. We’ll schedule a 30-minute call for an initial discussion to discuss the role and your experience, to see if they look like a good fit.
4. 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 1h outside of interview) or an exercise during the interview if you prefer. The problems are practical in nature (no fizz-buzz or reversing linked lists).
5. 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 try to 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.

We require that you:

• Have a minimum of 1-2 years relevant experience (we aren’t taking on new graduates at the moment)
  • Experience with the technologies we use helps, but you don’t need to know them all; your ability to learn is much more important to us.
• Will work for us full time (or nearly full time)
• Are based in the UK, EU, US or Canada
• Will usually be available in our core hours, 2pm–5pm UK time

Benefits

• Remote and flexible working.
• Salary £35k–£75k per year depending on experience.
• Additional compensation if participating in the out-of-hours rota.
• 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 get everyone together in London for team meetings several times a year for valuable face-to-face time (pandemic permitting).
• We’ll provide a new Mac, PC or Linux laptop, along with a stipend for other equipment.
• We provide a training budget; 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.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.