Senior Software Developer (backend)

Description

Would you like to help shape the future of open infrastructure that serves as the backbone of global scholarly communication? Join us as our Senior Software Developer with a backend focus.

• Location: Remote and global, to partially overlap with working hours in European time zones.
• Type: Full-Time, 40 hours a week, Mon-Fri.
• Remuneration: 90k USD 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 stabilise 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, Carlos del Ojo Elias
• Timeline: Advertise in February-March and offer by April

About the role

We are looking for a Senior Software Developer to join our Contributing to the Research Nexus (CRN) program. In this backend-focused role, you will help maintain, extend, and modernize our existing services while also leading the design and implementation of new greenfield systems. The role centres on JVM technologies and cloud-native, distributed systems operating at scale.

Crossref collects a wide range of metadata for an ever-growing and increasingly diverse collection of scholarly outputs. We build and operate services that register, link, and distribute scholarly research metadata. The CRN program develops retrieval, matching, and enrichment services that integrate closely with systems across Crossref.

We are a small organisation with a big impact, and we’re seeking a mission-driven Senior Software Developer who can help maintain and evolve our services, design well-scoped solutions, and contribute to operational reliability through code reviews and documentation. This role will collaborate closely with colleagues across Technology and Programs & Services teams.

Key responsibilities

• Understand Crossref’s mission and how we support it with our services
• Work collaboratively in multi-functional project teams
• Work closely with the Programs & Services Team to solve problems, maintain and improve our services and execute technology changes
• Collaborate with external stakeholders when needed
• Produce well-scoped and testable software design and specification
• Implement and test solutions using Clojure, Kotlin, Java and other relevant technologies
• Pursue continuous improvement across legacy and green-field codebases
• Provide code reviews and guidance to other developers regarding development practices and help maintain and improve our development environment
• Identify and report vulnerabilities and inefficiencies in our services
• Document and share development plans and changes
• Be an escalation point for technical support; investigate and respond to occasional but complex user issues

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 5 years of hands-on experience in software development, engineering, or similar
• Working knowledge of Clojure or another Lisp / functional language, or demonstrated ability and willingness to learn Clojure quickly.
• Familiarity with JVM technologies (Kotlin and/or Java)
• Comfortable working with Git, including code reviews and collaborative workflows
• Experience contributing to or maintaining production systems, including reading and extending existing codebases
• Experienced with continuous integration, testing and delivery frameworks, and cloud operations concepts and techniques
• Familiar with Docker technologies
• Strong communication skills and a collaborative approach to problem-solving
• Strong written communication skills, particularly for design discussions and technical documentation
• Comfortable being part of a geographically distributed team
• Self-directed, a good manager of your own time, with the ability to focus

Nice-to-have:

• Curious and tenacious at learning new things and getting to the bottom of problems
• Strong understanding of functional programming concepts, including immutability, pure functions, higher-order functions, composition
• Outstanding at interpersonal relations and relationship management
• Ability to work autonomously while collaborating in a distributed team environment
• A working understanding of XML and document-oriented systems such as Elasticsearch
• Some experience with Python, JavaScript or similar scripting languages
• Experience building tools for online scholarly communication or related fields such as library and information science
• Comfortable working in open source projects, including public issue tracking, pull requests, and community discussion
• Experience with JVM web frameworks (Spring, Quarkus, or similar)
• Direct experience with Clojure in production, especially in open source projects
• Experience with JVM internals, performance tuning, or memory management
• Familiarity with the scholarly communications domain

About Crossref & 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 23,000+ members from 160+ 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 50+ 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 close on March 10th, 2026.

Anticipated salary for this role is 90k USD-equivalent, paid in local currency. 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!