Jobs

About the role

You will play a key role in the software development team, being the technical lead for a number of services. You will contribute directly to the systems that form a critical part of thousands of scholarly publishers’ workflows, and help us to better serve our newer smaller members in the global academic community.

As a technical lead you will collaborate with the Product and Infrastructure teams to specify, design and implement our new features and services. You will have a key voice in discussions about technical approaches and architecture. You will always keep an eye on software quality and ensure that the code you produce and review is maintainable, well tested and of high quality.

Key responsibilities

• Understand Crossref’s mission and how we support it with our services.
• Pursue continuous improvement.
• Work flexibly in multi-functional project teams to scope, specify design and develop services and ensure that our systems are reliable, responsive, and efficient.
• Work closely with the Head of Software Development to solve problems, maintain and improve our services and execute technology changes.
• Provide code reviews and guidance to other developers regarding coding practices and help maintain and improve our development environment.
• Identify vulnerabilities and inefficiencies in our system architecture and development processes, particularly regarding cloud operations, metrics and testing.
• Communicate proactively with membership and technical support colleagues ensuring they have all the information and tools required to serve our users.
• Openly document and share development plans and workflow changes.
• Be an escalation point for technical support; investigate and respond to occasional but complex user issues; help minimize support demands related to our systems; be part of our on-call team responding to service outages.

About you

We don’t expect a successful candidate to tick all of these boxes right away!

• An expert senior developer with experience in Java or Clojure, and have a proven track record of picking up new technologies.
• Experienced with continuous integration, testing and delivery frameworks, and cloud operations concepts and techniques.
• Some experience with Python.
• Experience working on open source projects.
• Familiar with AWS, containerization and infrastructure management using tools like Terraform.
• Able to quickly pick up, understand and improve legacy code.
• Experience with, or a working understanding of, XML and document-oriented systems such as Elasticsearch.
• Experience building tools for online scholarly communication.
• Self-directed, a good manager of your own time with the ability to focus.
• Curious and tenacious at learning new things and getting to the bottom of problems.
• Strong at written and verbal communication skills, able to communicate clearly, simply, and effectively.
• Outstanding at interpersonal relations and relationship management, and comfortable working with other developers, product management, outreach, membership, and technical support teams.
• Assuming that international travel ever becomes possible again, the applicant should expect they will need to travel internationally to work with colleagues for about 5-10 days a year.

About the team

Like the rest of Crossref, the software development team is distributed. We can be found in the US east-coast, the UK, Ireland and France. We build and maintain the services for the Crossref community. Our metadata pipeline, reference matching, search and querying play a part in the operations of 12,000 publishers, who have registered the metadata for over 100 million content items. Our systems have evolved over our 20 year history, and we’re continuing to proactively update them. New code and services are written in modern Java and Clojure and run in AWS ECS, making use of Kafka and Elasticsearch.

Issue tracking and all new code is open source. We strongly believe in open scholarly infrastructure and openness at all stages of the software development lifecycle. As a membership organization we keep closely in touch with our users, and encourage our developers to be familiar with our community. The Development, Product and Infrastructure teams are tightly knit and we work in 2 week sprints.

About Crossref

Crossref makes research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse. We’re a not-for-profit membership organization that exists to make scholarly communications better. We rally the community; tag and share metadata; run an open infrastructure; play with technology; and make tools and services—all to help put research in context. It’s as simple—and as complicated—as that. Since January 2000 we have grown from strength to strength and now have over 12,000 members across 120 countries and thousands of tools and services relying on our metadata.

Crossref is committed to a policy of non-discrimination and equal opportunity for all employees and qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy or a condition related to pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, uniform service member status, or any other protected class under applicable law. Crossref will make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with known disabilities, in accordance with applicable law.