Would you like to help shape the future of open infrastructure that serves as the backbone of global scholarly communication? Join Crossref as a Senior Software Developer with a testing focus.
- Location: Remote and global, to partially overlap with working hours in European time zones.
- Type: Full-time, Monday-Friday
- Remuneration: 90k USD or local equivalent. We pay salaries in the currency of the country in which you’re based. We arrive at the local USD-equivalent salary by determining the average 5-year USD exchange rate, to stabilize currency fluctuations.
- Benefits: Check out our Employee Handbook for more details on paid time off, unlimited sick time, paid parental and medical leaves, and more.
- Reports to: Program Technical Lead, Bharath Govindarajan
- Timeline: Advertise in April-May and offer by June.
About the role
We’re looking for a Senior Software Developer in Test (SDET) to join our Open and Sustainable Operations (OSO) program, taking on significant responsibility for the quality, reliability, and scalability of complex systems across OSO and other Crossref initiatives. This role is focused on establishing and advancing automated testing practices and building the engineering infrastructure needed to support consistent, high-quality software delivery.
You’ll lead the design and implementation of robust automated testing frameworks, pipelines, and tooling, working across systems that integrate structured metadata, APIs, and user-facing workflows used by Crossref’s diverse global membership. A key part of the role is creating and maintaining testing infrastructure that enables reliable, repeatable, and scalable testing from integration tests through to end-to-end and contract testing across distributed services.
You’ll work on long-lived and complex systems that require strong quality practices to ensure they remain reliable, accessible, and performant as they evolve. Your focus will be on making quality measurable and enforceable through automation, improving test coverage, reducing regression risk, and enabling teams to deliver changes with confidence.
Many of these systems are used directly by Crossref members and the wider research community, and the testing strategies and infrastructure you build will have a direct impact on the stability and trustworthiness of these services in practice. You’ll have autonomy in how you approach quality engineering challenges, while collaborating closely with engineers to embed effective testing practices into everyday development workflows, as part of a collaborative, mission-driven Technology Team reporting to the Program Technical Lead.
Key responsibilities
- Define and evolve testing approaches across unit, integration, end-to-end, and contract testing to ensure comprehensive coverage of complex systems.
- Develop scalable, reliable test frameworks, tooling, and CI/CD integrations that enable consistent and repeatable test execution across environments.
- Design and implement performance, load, and stress testing approaches to ensure systems can scale and perform reliably under varying conditions.
- Work closely with technology teams to embed automated testing into everyday development workflows, improving overall quality and reducing manual effort.
- Enable fast, actionable feedback from test pipelines through better reporting, monitoring, and failure analysis.
- Introduce and maintain metrics such as test coverage, flakiness, failure rates, and deployment confidence to guide continuous improvement.
- Ensure robust validation of integrations, data flows, and contracts between services, particularly in systems handling structured metadata and external APIs.
- Provide guidance on testing approaches, review test implementations, and help raise the overall quality engineering capability across teams.
About you
You’re a software developer who enjoys understanding problems end-to-end and making thoughtful technical decisions. You’re comfortable working with ambiguity, you care deeply about users, and you take pride in building systems that last.
You don’t need close supervision, but you value collaboration, challenge assumptions constructively, and know when to bring others into technical decisions.
We know no-one will meet all the requirements, but we are looking for people who are willing to learn and like to meet new challenges - please apply if this feels like you!
Essential skills and experience:
- Minimum 7 years of hands-on experience in software development, engineering, or similar.
- Experience in designing clear, effective test cases (functional, edge, negative) and translating requirements into reliable automated tests.
- Deep expertise in designing and implementing automated tests (unit, integration, E2E, API).
- Proficient with modern testing tools (e.g., Playwright, Cypress, Selenium) and building reusable libraries.
- Experience integrating tests into CI/CD (GitLab CI, Jenkins).
- Experience in using Docker for consistent, scalable test environments.
- Skilled in setting up and maintaining test environments, data, and ensuring reproducibility.
- A self-directed working style, paired with strong communication skills and a collaborative approach to problem-solving.
- Experience in collaborating closely with developers to embed quality and influence engineering culture.
- Proactive approach to identifying gaps, evaluating tools, and evolving testing strategies.
- A preference for clear documentation and shared understanding.
- Experience managing long-lived production systems, balancing change, stability, and iteration.
- Familiar with writing and executing performance, load, and stress tests using modern tools (e.g., k6, Gatling, JMeter) to validate system scalability and reliability.
- Outstanding at interpersonal relations and relationship management.
Nice to have:
- Background in scholarly communications and/or open infrastructure/open metadata.
- Experience in the non-profit sector or with community-led organisations.
- Contributions to open source (code, documentation, or community involvement).
- Understanding of accessibility standards (e.g., WCAG) and integrating them into automated testing.
- Experience with other programming languages like Java, Kotlin.
- Exposure to monitoring and logging tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack) for performance analysis.
- Experience using Jira and Zephyr to define, manage, and track test cases.
About Crossref and the team
We’re a non-profit membership organisation 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.
We envision a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society. We are working towards this vision of a ‘Research Nexus’ by demonstrating the value of richer and connected open metadata, incentivising people to meet best practices, while making it easier to do so. “We” means 24,000+ members from 166+ countries, 170+ million records, and nearly 2 billion monthly metadata queries from thousands of tools across the research ecosystem. We want to be a sustainable source of complete, open, and global scholarly metadata and relationships.
Take a look at our strategic agenda to see the planned work that aims to achieve the vision. The sustainability area aims to make transparent all the processes and procedures we follow to run the operation long-term, including our financials and our ongoing commitment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). The governance area describes our board and its role in community oversight.
It also takes a strong team – because reliable infrastructure needs committed people who contribute to and realise the vision, and thrive doing it. We are a distributed group of 56+ dedicated people who take our work seriously, but don’t take ourselves seriously - we like to play quizzes, measure coffee intake, and create 100s of custom slack emojis. We do this through fair policies and working practices, a balanced approach to resourcing, and accountability to each other.
We can offer the successful candidate a challenging and fun environment to work in. Together we are dedicated to our global mission and we are constantly adapting to ensure we get there. Take a look at our organisation chart, the latest Annual Meeting recordings, and our financial information.
Thinking of applying?
We especially encourage applications from people with backgrounds historically under-represented in research and scholarly communications. You can be based anywhere in the world where we can employ staff, either directly or through an employer of record.
We will invite selected candidates to an initial call to discuss the role. Following that, shortlisted candidates will be invited to work on a short (1-2 hours) take-home assignment. This will be followed by a technical interview. The last step will be a panel interview, where you will receive questions in advance. All interviews will be held remotely on Zoom.
Click here to apply!
Applications will close on May 5th, 2026.
Anticipated salary for this role is 90k USD-equivalent, paid in local currency.We calculate the local salary by using the five-year average exchange rate between your currency and USD. This helps balance out exchange rate fluctuations.
Crossref offers competitive compensation, benefits, flexible work arrangements, professional development opportunities, and a supportive work environment. Check out our Employee Handbook for more details on paid time off, unlimited sick time, paid parental and medical leaves, and more.
Equal opportunities commitment
Crossref is committed to a policy of non-discrimination and equal opportunity for all employees and qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, colour, 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.
Thanks for your interest in joining Crossref. We are excited to hear from you!
