Jobs

We are seeking a talented DevOps Engineer to join our Infrastructure Services team at Crossref.

• Location: Remote and global, to partially overlap with working hours in European time zones.
• Type: Full-time
• Remuneration: 85-90k USD or local equivalent. Note this is a general guide (as there is no universal currency) and local currency analysis will take place before the final offer.
• Reports to: Head of Infrastructure Services, Stewart Houten
• Timeline: Advertise in July-August and offer in September-October.

About the role

Crossref operates an open infrastructure that connects thousands of scholarly publishers, millions of research articles, and research objects to serve an increasingly diverse set of communities within scholarly publishing, research, funding, and beyond. Our system acts as the backbone for preserving and sharing the scholarly record. We offer a wide array of services to ensure that scholarly research metadata is registered, linked, and distributed. When members register their content with us, we collect both bibliographic and non-bibliographic metadata. We process it so that connections can be made between publications, people, organizations, and other associated outputs. We preserve the metadata we receive as a critical part of the scholarly record. We also make it openly available across a range of interfaces and formats so that the community can use it and build tools with it.

We are looking for a skilled DevOps Engineer to contribute to a key component of the global scholarly research infrastructure. You will help maintain our infrastructure, adapt it to modern engineering principles, and evolve to meet the requirements of ever-changing scholarly communication. This is a hands-on engineering role requiring deep Linux expertise, along with a strong focus on automation and observability. You will work alongside developers and data scientists across the broader Technology team, supporting innovation, driving continuous improvement, and promoting transparent operations.

Key responsibilities

• Keep the system running by contributing to incident response and post-incident reviews
• Continuously evaluate and improve infrastructure performance, security, and scalability
• Build and maintain automation tools and infrastructure-as-code to streamline deployments, configuration management, and operations
• Implement and enhance observability solutions, including monitoring, logging, and alerting, to ensure high system reliability and visibility
• Implement and promote best practices around scalable, cost-controlled, and secure operations
• Collaborate with software developers and data scientists to integrate DevOps best practices into the development lifecycle
• Participate in architecture and design discussions with a focus on maintainability and reliability
• Maintain clear and comprehensive documentation for infrastructure systems, processes, and automation pipelines

About you

Essential skills and experience:

• Deep Linux systems administration experience with containerized workloads
• Good knowledge of AWS or an alternative cloud provider
• Enthusiasm for infrastructure-as-code in Terraform, OpenTofu, or similar
• Experience in building and running CI/CD pipelines
• Fluency in scripting and automation (Python, Bash, Ansible)
• Familiarity with cloud-native best practices
• Pragmatic approach to supporting legacy software
• Enthusiasm for maintaining clear documentation for infrastructure practices and runbooks
• Good communication skills and the ability to communicate technical concepts to a non-technical audience
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Willingness to learn new skills and work with a variety of technologies
• Ability to work independently while actively collaborating and consulting with others
• Self-motivated, collaborative, and proactive, with a positive attitude and a preference for working in a small, distributed team

It would be an advantage if you had experience with some of the following:

• Configuration management (Ansible, Puppet)
• JVM-based programming languages (Java, Clojure, Kotlin)
• Relational databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL
• No-SQL databases (ElasticSearch, Redis, DynamoDB)
• Container management (Fargate, Kubernetes)
• Message queues (SQS, ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ)
• Monitoring and observability (Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch)

About Crossref & the team

We’re a nonprofit 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 20,000+ members from 160 countries, 160+ 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 49 dedicated people who like to play quizzes, talk about celery (sometimes cucumber), measure coffee intake, and create 100s of custom slack emojis. We enthusiastically support the Oxford comma but waver between use of American or British English. Occasionally we do some work to improve knowledge sharing worldwide— which we take a bit more seriously than ourselves. 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 here.

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 an interview. You will receive all questions in advance, and the interview will include some questions and/or exercises you’ll have a chance to prepare for. All interviews will be held remotely on Zoom.

Click here to apply!

Please strive to submit your application by August 14th, 2025.

Anticipated salary for this role is approximately 85-90k USD-equivalent, paid in local currency. Crossref offers competitive compensation, benefits, flexible work arrangements, professional development opportunities, and a supportive work environment. As a nonprofit organisation, we prioritize mission over profit.

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!