Senior Software Engineer

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 16 million registered users from around the world, over 600,000 people use our platform each day, and we host over 100 million user-created projects.

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.

Overleaf is part of Digital Science. Digital Science are advancing the research ecosystem. We are a pioneering technology company, and our vision is of a future where a trusted and collaborative research ecosystem drives progress for all. We believe in better, open, collaborative and inclusive research. In creating the next generation of tools and working in partnership with the community, we tackle some of the biggest challenges to research. In order to achieve our vision, we need innovative, inspiring and dynamic people to join our team. Want to join us?

Your new role

We’re looking to add an engineer to our growing team. Our backend stack is mainly Node.js, Express, MongoDB and Redis hosted on Google Cloud Platform, mainly in Google Kubernetes Engine. Our frontend stack is React with TypeScript. And we’re in large part open source (). We deploy 2–6 times daily, supported by a modern cloud stack, continuous integration and a lot of automation.

As a specific example of a project you might be working on, we are working towards a major new feature which is highly requested among users: offline editing. This is a large technical project touching many areas of the backend and the frontend.

Due to business need, we require this role to be based in the UK, Germany, Romania or Spain only.

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 practise 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.