What We Do
Overleaf is a startup and social enterprise that builds modern collaborative authoring tools for scientists — like Google Docs for Science. We have over four million registered users from around the world. Our primary product is an online, real-time collaborative editor for papers, theses, technical reports and other documents written in the LaTeX markup language.
Who We Are
Overleaf was founded by two mathematicians who were inspired by their own experiences in academia to create a better solution for scientific collaboration and communication. Now we are a team of about forty with fifteen developers, based mainly in and around the UK and in the US. We were recognised as one of the
UK’s top 100 fastest growing businesses in 2018.
About a third of our development team joined us through our acquisition of ShareLaTeX, another major online LaTeX editor, in 2017, and we’ve now integrated the two teams.
Our Tech
Overleaf is based on open source software, and most of our product code is itself open source. You can find it on GitHub:
https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex (note: most activity is in the repos linked from there).
We run a mainly Node.js back end using MongoDB, PostgreSQL and Redis. We use a microservices architecture, with about a dozen services. Most of our code is written in CoffeeScript, but we are in the process of decaffeinating to use ES6. On the front end, we mainly use Angular v1 and are incrementally migrating to React.
We’re hosted mainly on Linode and managed with Chef but will be moving imminently to Google Kubernetes Engine. We use Docker to manage our development environments. We support continuous delivery and typically deploy at least a few times a day (less on Fridays).
How We Work
Overleaf is remote-first — all founders and staff work remotely. We also have an office by King’s Cross station for those in the London area, and we get the whole team together in London several times a year for face-to-face time.
We encourage flexible working. Our core hours are 2pm–5pm UK time, during which our development teams have 10–15 minute daily standup calls. We have few standing meetings for developers, but we do many smaller video or voice calls for pairing or within teams.
We always collect user feedback to inform our work. We have UX professionals on our team, and we run many surveys and user interviews.
We organize our work with Kanban. We use GitHub pull requests for each feature with code review to share knowledge and best practices (and catch bugs). We test thoroughly with automated unit and acceptance tests, supported by continuous integration (CI). We’re also fans of linting to minimise bike-shedding (and to catch bugs).
About This Role
We plan to add two developers to our team, one with a back end focus and one with a more full stack focus. Experience with some of Node.js, Kubernetes, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, Angular and React are desirable. Ruby on Rails experience is also a plus, because we have one Rails service from before our integration with ShareLaTeX.
Key projects on our road map this year include:
- University Single Sign On — make it easier for users at our 60+ institutional customers to log in to Overleaf
- New releases of our on premise editions — anyone can install our open source Community Edition, and many labs and companies install our commercially supported Server Pro edition
- Improve our B2C conversion metrics and monitoring — a more data-heavy project focused on web analytics
Here are some examples of projects (large and small) we’ve recently completed:
In the longer term, we are planning projects around improved collaboration features for teams, improvements to our rich text mode, and more.
How We Hire
The stages in our hiring process are typically:
- We will aim to update you on the status of your application within 14 days from when we receive it.
- We’ll follow up by email (or sometimes schedule a phone call) with any questions we have about your application, usually around logistics, your ambitions and your expectations about the role.
- We’ll schedule a more in-depth interview, which is typically two hours long. The first hour is discussion, and the second hour is technical. For the technical, you’ll have the option of either completing a homework assignment, which requires about one hour of your time before the interview, or solving a problem in the interview, if you prefer. The problems are practical in nature (no fizz-buzz or reversing linked lists), and you can use Google, man pages, etc., and ask us questions.
- We’ll make an offer. We usually interview in batches, so there may be a short delay while we interview other candidates, but we will try to keep you informed throughout the process.
If you have a deadline, please let us know in your application, and we will try to be accommodating.
Requirements
We require that you:
- have a minimum of 2–3 years of relevant experience (we aren’t taking on more new graduates at the moment).
- will work for us full time (or nearly full time).
- will usually be available in our core hours, 2pm–5pm UK time.
Experience with the technologies we use is always a plus, but you don’t need to know them all; your ability to learn is much more important to us.
Benefits
- Remote and flexible working.
- Salary £40k–£75k per year depending on experience.
- You would join a small, dedicated and growing team.
- We’re substantially (around 80%) open source, so your work will often be on open source code.
- We’re backed by Bethnal Green Ventures (https://bethnalgreenventures.com/) and Digital Science (https://www.digital-science.com/), through which we’re part of a wider community of startups in science, health and ed-tech.
- Our London office is shared with several other Digital Science companies, so there’s lots of interesting people to meet, and clubs and sports activities outside of work.
- We get everyone together in London for team meetings several times a year for valuable face-to-face time.
- You can pick your own equipment. MacBook Pro? Lenovo ThinkPad? Notebook and pen? However you like to work, we’ll provide what you need.
- We provide a training budget; many of our developers choose to attend relevant industry conferences or buy training materials.
- We run a biweekly internal seminar series (show and tell) with short talks from staff about their work or personal projects, new technologies and techniques.
We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.
