[Hiring] Head of Infrastructure @Digital Science

About us

What you’ll be doing

This role is a management role with significant hands-on technical responsibilities.

As a team manager, your responsibilities will include:

• Line managing two senior Overleaf DevOps engineers, including career development and performance management.
• Building, maintaining and managing the delivery of the Overleaf Operations roadmap, in conjunction with the Overleaf Platform team.

As an IC and technical lead, your responsibilities will include:

• Implementing best-practices on observability, monitoring and reliability.
• Educating the wider engineering teams on best practices.
• Assisting the Operations team working on DevOps or other maintenance tasks.
• Overseeing resource usage on GCP, ensuring we are managing our costs efficiently.
• Designing and developing additional run-books, and helping transfer knowledge to other engineers, to widen the number of people who can be on-call.

This role has strong potential for progression into wider responsibility across the Digital Science Infrastructure and Operations team, which might include:

• Driving adoption of consistent standards across the Digital Science Technology organisation.
• Evangelising DevOps principles across DS Technology
• Larger management remit with other DevOps engineers from DS Technology, including potentially being a ‘manager of managers’ 

What you’ll bring to the role

To do this job well you should:

• Have significant in-depth working knowledge of cloud-computing environments, and especially Google Cloud.
• Know how to implement best-practice alerting, monitoring and observability on applications that experience high load both continuously and in spikes.
• Have an excellent track record of dealing with production incidents.
• Have a security-first mindset at all times, covering confidentiality, integrity and availability.
• Have managed engineers as a technical lead or line manager.
• Have made decisions based on operational and technical tradeoffs, then delivered the result as a team lead.

Some things that may be a bonus (but learning these on the job will be fine):

• Experience with Terraform, Kubernetes, or Prometheus.
• Database experience with Mongo, PostgreSQL, or Redis.

We expect you to:

• Work with us full time.
• Have strong written and verbal communication in English.
• Be available during core hours (1400 to 1700 UK time) for occasional meetings. We are not a fully distributed and asynchronous team, though we do aim to minimize meetings.

Not sure you meet all qualifications? Let us decide! Research shows that women and members of other under-represented groups tend to not apply to jobs when they think they may not meet every qualification, when in fact, they often do! We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment and strongly encourage you to apply.

Benefits

• Remote and flexible working.
• We’ll provide a new Mac, Windows or Linux laptop, along with a stipend for other equipment.
• We provide a training budget; many of our staff choose to attend relevant industry conferences or buy training materials.
• At least once a year, we meet in-person at an expenses-paid company or departmental retreat. In 2024 we went to Màlaga (Spain) and Oxford (UK).
• We run two biweekly internal seminar series (‘Show and Tell’ and ‘Wisdom Wednesdays’) with short talks from staff about their work or personal projects, new technologies and techniques.
• If you’re in the UK and in or near London, our well-equipped office space is available for your use, and shared with several other group companies.

Living our Values

We invest in, nurture and support innovative businesses and technologies that make all parts of the research process more open, efficient and effective. 

The talent we secure is fundamental to us achieving our vision and our growth plans. The values we live by are:

We are brave in the pursuit of better

We are collaborative and inclusive

We are always open-minded