Senior Software Developer

Description

We’re looking for the next member of the Software Development team. We build, operate and maintain metadata services that enable the global research community. We’re on a journey to build features to serve the evolving needs of our changing membership, and migrate our legacy technology. As a team, we have a deep understanding not only of technology, but also the needs of our diverse community.

You will specify, design and implement improvements, 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 and your colleagues produce is maintainable, well tested, and of high quality.

Our new code is written primarily in Kotlin, on the back-end and Typescript on the frontend, and legacy code is written in Java. We don’t expect you to be familiar with our technologies yet, though it’s a bonus. This is primarily a back-end role.

You should have in-depth knowledge of at least one compiled, typed or functional language (e.g. Java, Clojure, Kotlin, Scala, C#, Go, Typescript etc) and a history of learning new languages and technologies on the job.

We are a geographically distributed, remote-first team with flexible working hours.

Key responsibilities

• Understand Crossref’s mission and how we support it with our services Collaborate with external stakeholders when needed
• Pursue continuous improvement across legacy and green-field codebases Work flexibly in multi-functional project teams, especially with the Product team, to design and develop services
• Ensure that solutions are reliable, responsive, and efficient
• Produce well-scoped, testable, software specifications
• Implement and test solutions using Kotlin, Java and other relevant technologies
• 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 development practices and help maintain and improve our development environment
• Identify vulnerabilities and inefficiencies in our system architecture and 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! If you have any questions, please get in touch.

Qualities

• Comfortable collaborating with colleagues or stakeholders in the community
• Have a proven track record of picking up new technologies
• Outstanding at interpersonal relations and relationship management
• Comfortable collaborating with colleagues across the organisation
• Self-directed, a good manager of your own time, with the ability to focus
• Comfortable being part of a distributed team
• Curious and tenacious at learning new things and getting to the bottom of problems

Skills

• An expert senior developer with experience in Java, Kotlin, or related languages
• Experience in Spring or similar frameworks
• Experienced with continuous integration, testing and delivery frameworks, and cloud operations concepts and techniques
• Familiar with AWS, containerization and infrastructure management using tools like Terraform
• Some experience with Python, JavaScript or similar scripting languages
• Experience working on open source projects
• Able to quickly understand, refactor and improve legacy code and fix defects
• A working understanding of XML and document-oriented systems such as Elasticsearch
• Experience building tools for online scholarly communication or related fields such as Library and information science, etc
• Ability to create and maintain a project plan
• Strong at written and verbal communication skills, able to communicate clearly, simply, and effectively

About the team

The Crossref team is distributed across the world. The Software Development team is based in Europe and the US. We work alongside the Product, Infrastructure and Labs teams.

All new code, and most issue tracking, is open source. We strongly believe in open scholarly infrastructure and openness at all stages of the software development lifecycle. We perform code reviews and practice continuous deployment for all new code.

As a membership organization we keep closely in touch with our users, and encourage our developers to be familiar with our community.

We work fully remotely, but try to meet in person at least once a year. This is a full-time position, but working hours are flexible. The applicant should expect they will need to travel internationally to work with colleagues for about 5-10 days a year. If you have any questions we would be happy to discuss.

You can be based anywhere in the world where we can employ staff, either directly or through an employer of record.