ROR is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join as our Technical Lead, based at DataCite. You will be leading, developing, and architecting ROR services and infrastructure. ROR is a collaborative effort with resourcing from multiple organizations. The ROR Technical Lead will work on the ROR project according to priorities agreed with the ROR Operations Team, and will be part of the DataCite development team, and report to DataCite’s Engineering Director.

About ROR

ROR is a community-led project to develop an open, sustainable, usable, and unique identifier for every research organization in the world.

ROR launched in January 2019 for use by the research community, for the purposes of increasing the use of organization identifiers in the community and enabling connections between organization records in various systems. Implementation of ROR IDs in scholarly infrastructure and metadata enables more efficient discovery and tracking of research outputs across institutions and funding bodies.

ROR is run by a small group of steering organizations in collaboration with a broad network of community advisors and supporters. Read more about ROR’s governance structure and community supporters.

About DataCite

DataCite is a global community-led organization. Our mission is to be a world leading provider of persistent identifier services to help make research outputs and resources findable, citable, connected and reused globally.

How we work

We are a fully remote team, this means we do not have a physical office and we work where it is most comfortable. The team is distributed across Europe and North America, supporting a global community of organizational members.

All our work is publicly available on https://github.com/ror-community and https://github.com/datacite

Responsibilities and duties

• Lead the ROR technical strategy in consultation with various stakeholders, including the ROR Operations Team
• Collaborate closely with the ROR team on day to day activities, including the ROR Project Lead, Adoption Manager and Data Manager
• Participate as an active member of the ROR Operations Team (including stakeholders from the governing organizations)
• Collaborate with the ROR team to develop specifications and prioritize development tasks
• Develop full-stack product features in an open source software environment, including user-facing front-end services and backend APIs
• Refactor applications and infrastructure as needed  and to ensure services run smoothly and reliably
• Test, deploy and monitor applications, and react to problems
• Collaborate with the rest of the DataCite Engineering team and follow best practices and processes in place  to provide a quality and iterative environment
• Support the DataCite development team in shared services
• Advocate for product quality, security and performance
• Follow industry best practices for highly scalable web applications and services, and work with the team to provide suggestions for improvement
• Develop and maintain documentation for common operational tasks

Requirements

• Experience architecting and leading global projects
• Preferably based in a timezone that aligns with the Americas
• Proven experience as a Full stack Developer
• Proficiency with fundamental front-end technologies, HTML/CSS/Javascript
• 3+ years of experience with server-side languages such as Python or Ruby
• Hands-on experience architecting, developing, deploying, and maintaining web applications, including system administration, monitoring, log management, and support
• Familiarity with relational databases and search engines such as ElasticSearch
• Familiarity with cloud computing and DevOps practices including Infrastructure as Code
• Excellent communication skills, and the flexibility that is needed for working in a small, distributed team

Nice to have

• Experience with AWS, Terraform and Git/Github
• Experience with Django or similar
• Strong interest in open science and data sharing
• Experience with performance investigation and optimization
• Understanding of code review processes
• Good technical documentation skills
• Computer science education or equivalent experience
• Interest to learn and use other programming languages
• Familiarity with events driven architecture, distributed systems, serverless architecture and async processing

Above all what we value are smart and engaged software engineers who care about the work they do and the quality of the end result, this makes up for any lack of experience you may have in any of the above requirements.

Equal opportunities commitment

DataCite is committed to a policy of non-discrimination and equal opportunity for all employees and qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, 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. DataCite will make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with known disabilities in accordance with applicable law.

Why work for us

• Full-time, fully remote position
• Healthcare and retirement benefits in alignment with local conventions
• 30 days vacation time annually and 1 day paid extra for volunteer work of your choice
• Flexible working hours
• Option to work in co-working with a paid contribution from us.
• Opportunity to learn something new every day, we are an evolving community and team
• Adaptable - we embrace change and uncertainty and work together to adapt to new situations

To apply

Please send a resume and statement of interest to sarala@datacite.org. We only accept applications by individuals.

Interviews will be scheduled from the end of December 2021. We would like the candidate to start in this role on February 1, 2022. Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions.