We’re hiring a Senior Backend Engineer here at LibLynx.
What We Do
LibLynx provides data services to the scholarly publishing and related industries. Our “digital plumbing” empowers organisations to manage the identity and access of their users, and perform analytics on usage of their products and services.
Our clients are diverse; ranging from complex global organisations through to non-profits to small startups. Each brings a unique blend of needs, systems, and processes. And all of them help advance and disseminate human knowledge.
As a growing influence in a large industry, our success comes from acting at the leading edge and applying complex domain knowledge and expertise in an emerging space; we’re often the first to launch new services and products.
Our culture is innovative, collaborative, and empowering, pooling our skills and experience in a small yet powerful team. We value roles that are challenging and satisfying, and meet a need to work on meaningful projects that make a difference to the world.
What You’ll Bring
You’re already an experienced backend engineer – as well as core software development, you also think “beyond the code” to the wider architecture and business reasons.
You know when to create something bespoke, and when to re-use existing tech. You enjoy learning and acting autonomously, and prefer working on long-lived products over short-term projects, including taking ownership of what you’ve built.
At LibLynx you’ll be solving, building and growing chunky, open-ended technical challenges specific to our business domain, with space for experimentation and learning. For example:
- designing, building, and maintaining systems to handle thousands of IAM events per second, and billions of analytics events a year
- updating and replacing platform infrastructure for high availability and scalability
- data analysis and pipelines
- building APIs and web interfaces for both LibLynx staff, client technical teams, and client support staff
You’ll join our lean, fully-remote Engineering team, supported by our Engineering Manager, and work day-to-day with engineers, product team, Client Success, and others.
You MUST have:
- demonstrable experience for at least five years in software engineering, solving problems like the above
- recent experience in the PHP framework Symfony
- experience in, or willingness to learn, Go and Python
- devops tools and methods – we use GitLab, docker, and terraform
- experience with large scale OLTP databases
It’s nice if you’re familiar with:
- large scale analytics processing with OLAP database systems
- machine learning in data analysis
- distributed technologies such as redis and clustered databases
- work in smaller, fully-remote companies
And we’ll love it if you’re familiar with, or interested to learn domain knowledge like:
- scholarly publishing
- SAML authentication technologies
- COUNTER reporting
Agentic AI
LibLynx does not (yet) use agentic AI in our products. We encourage engineers to use agentic AI as part of the development process as any other productivity tool, in a secure way.
A typical week
What would your day-to-day look like? Here’s a fictional yet realistic week…
| Monday | Engineering team checkin – 10AM UK time. How were people’s weekends? What doe the week look like?
Your priority for the week is building up LETTERBOX, a distributed authentication product. You had a tech plan call with the Engineering Manager and CTO last week; the road is open and clear. |
| Tuesday | Each morning the team writes a simple text update in Slack; and an optional “daily hotline” call to make sure people aren’t blocked. Your daily update is about yesterday’s work on LETTERBOX.
A UX engineer asks to pair on what they need from a database via an API. You both create a tech plan based on the product spec , track it in Asana and the team schedules this for later in the week. Later, you lead tech planning for a new feature, codenamed MONGOOSE. No other meetings. |
| Wednesday | There’s a team retro along with the “daily hotline” and text update.
After that a 1:1 with the Engineering Manager. These are kept informal and you talk about new skills you can learn around upcoming projects. In the afternoon is the monthly Company Meeting – you learn more about the company’s clients, how other teams are doing (Zendesk tickets down 35% due to an improved error page) and latest developments on research integrity in scholarly publishing. The rest of the day is working on LETTERBOX. |
| Thursday | Service incidents are rare, but for the purposes of the job role, we’ll make one up!
A pagerduty alert fires at 09:58, and you’re part of the incident response. You trace the issue to a malformed registration URL that has been bulk emailed to thousands of library patrons. You work out a quick fix that will allow the URL to work as expected, test it, and release it to production. Once the dust has settled, you collaborate on an internal RCA, including internal improvements to the service to prevent a repeat and internal alerts for it in our devops Slack channel. |
| Friday | Good progress on LETTERBOX, so after a chat with the team work on the UX API from Tuesday instead.
No meetings. |
To Apply
We’ve a simple three-stage hiring process:
- culture fit interview with Engineering Manager
- technical interview with CTO and others in the team
- final stage with our CEO
Send your resume and a personal introduction to careers@liblynx.com – we’ll be excited to hear from you!
(no recruiters or agencies at this time, please)