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Headquarters: London, UK
URL: https://www.overleaf.com
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 three 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 thirty 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.
In September 2018, we officially launched 'Overleaf v2', the latest version of our platform, which we've been working on since our acquisition of ShareLaTeX, the other major online LaTeX editor, in 2017. We've now integrated the two products and teams.
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 we have a 10–15 minute daily standup call for the whole development team. We have few standing meetings for the development team, but we do many smaller video or voice calls for pairing or within project groups.
We don't yet have standing teams, but we form and dissolve smaller teams on a per-project basis; we try to give everyone the opportunity to serve as a team lead if they want to.
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 organise 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 bikeshedding (and to catch bugs).
About This Role
This is a broad role, which you will be able to shape as the business grows, but in the short term we will ask you to:
- Own process at the level of the whole engineering team, now 17 people, including leading retrospectives and ensuring that teams are working well together and have appropriate processes for managing their work. At least in the short term, you will also be directly involved in planning work for the whole team (e.g. backlog grooming, ensuring tickets are well specified, monitoring for bottlenecks).
- Take on line management of the engineering team, including improvement of frameworks for career progression and performance review, and including regular 1:1s with the development team.
- Represent the engineering team in communications with our sales, marketing and support teams.
- Play an active role in our hiring process, including continuing to refine that process, forming interview panels, and often participating in those panels.
- Contribute to decisions on technical architecture and tools for development and operations (e.g. languages, frameworks) as we continue to scale the product while controlling costs.
- Contribute to mentoring developers and setting up systems to support their growth and training, such as pairing and internal training or sharing sessions.
- Take opportunities to get hands on, to make sure you can stay in touch with the day-to-day work of the team.
These responsibilities currently sit with me, our CTO, and we will be working closely together. As we continue to grow the engineering team, I would like to be able to focus on our product, where I believe I can have the most impact. I am looking for an experienced engineering manager to help the team to continue to develop and to uphold
the values that have carried us this far. In particular, at Overleaf we aim to be:
- Friendly, open and approachable - if we can help, we do.
- Collaborative and innovative, with a love of science & learning.
- Trustworthy and professional, but not corporate.
- Sustainable, scalable and reliable, both as people and in our tech.
- Making our users’ lives easier, by putting the user first.
- Remote-first and flexible, to working styles & personal lives.
To give you an idea of what we do, here are some examples of projects (large and small) we recently completed as part of our Overleaf v2 work:
This year, we have many projects planned including Single Sign On for our many university clients, improvements to our rich text mode, Dropbox sync, B2C conversion funnel, and much 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 one week 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 practical. For the practical, you'll have the option of either completing a homework assignment, which requires about one hour of your time before the interview, or doing an exercise during the interview, if you prefer. The exercises are practical in nature, and you can use Google, 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 8 years of relevant experience.
- will work for us full time (or nearly full time).
- will usually be available in our core hours, 2pm–5pm UK time.
Benefits
- Remote and flexible working.
- Competitive compensation package.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 staff 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.
To apply: https://overleaf.workable.com/j/BAEE877503
Posted Overleaf Engineering Manager on February 4, 2019 via
