Remote Backend Jobs

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.

What you’ll be doing

• 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.

• 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.
• 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.