Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer

Do you want to develop software that helps scientists, doctors, historians, and all other kinds of researchers discover breakthroughs? Join our small, fully-remote software development team to build software that connects scholars of all disciplines with the peer-reviewed journal articles they need to advance their research. 

Since our remote-first company's founding in 2011, Third Iron has created the industry-leading software services BrowZine and LibKey.  Our users include millions of students, doctors, industry researchers, and scientists affiliated with over 1,300 libraries at universities, hospitals, corporations, and government departments across 36 countries including places like Stanford University, NASA, Mayo Clinic, NHS England, and University of Hong Kong.

In a refreshing change from advertising-dependent tech companies or those who sell user data, we instead have a business-to-business model. We sell our subscription-based services to libraries that may be used by anyone affiliated with them. We do not sell user data.  Our focus is on building the best software to enable research that changes the world.

Your Role

As a Senior Full Stack Software Engineer, you will help with all aspects of the development lifecycle: initial architectural approaches, coding the automated tests and implementation, and reviewing changes by your experienced teammates. Our product owners have a deep understanding of both our external and internal customers needs and wants, which helps ensure what we build has maximum positive impact to our users. 

Our remote-first company has been building software for over 10 years fully distributed, so you’ll be joining a team with plenty of experience putting into practice what works well remotely (and avoiding what doesn’t!). We try to build our products with an eye on the long term, since when we build new features or products, we typically regularly maintain them years into the future.

Key Responsibilities

• Contribute to our Third Iron tools and backend systems, written primarily in Node.js and Postgres, and used by our operations team to manage large amounts of data from over 1,300 library customers

• Help shape and build our APIs, used both internally and by third parties, written in Node.js and adopting many concepts from JSON API 1.0

• Increase your experience and knowledge of Node.js, Postgresql, Elasticsearch, CouchDB, continuous integration, and load testing. Learn about all the tools we use at our StackShare

• Optimize and help scale our Heroku and AWS cloud-based systems as our customer base grows to ensure solid performance for all users

• Opportunities to assist with our web app clients, BrowZine and LibKey, that are built with Ember, and our browser extension LibKey Nomad, built with React

What We’re Looking For

• Experience with SQL; we use Postgres to store the majority of our data, and maintaining very fast APIs and internal processes is important to us. Bonus if you have NoSQL experience, such as ElasticSearch or CouchDB

• An interest in NodeJS and JavaScript

• Strong communication skills – since we are a remote team, clear, timely, and frequent communication is essential

• Experience writing automated tests alongside your code – we rely on numerous automated tests to help avoid regressions, both at the acceptance and unit level

• Experience with source control, ideally git

• Self-motivation and comfort working independently, which we've found is important for remote working

• Interest in lifelong learning, including learning new technologies. We embrace the tools and techniques that help us build great software which lets us sleep soundly at night, with high confidence that our users are having a delightful experience and our servers are not catching fire

• People with U.S. work authorizations.  (We are looking for a full-time developer to join our team, so please, no software development firms looking to hire out contractors - we're interested in talking directly to software developers)

Working at Third Iron

Third Iron is a small company of 25 employees and our growth and success have been fueled by the passionate, curious people who work here. We value input and feedback while looking to minimize the interruptions of meetings, report writing, and internal emails.

Understanding that work is just part of your life, Third Iron also provides benefits including health, dental, long-term disability, paid time-off, home-office stipend, and more. It's why most employees who work at Third Iron spend many years of their careers here.  You could, too!

Apply

To apply, simply fill out the job application, and please include anything that helps demonstrate how you are an effective software developer teammate. Examples include your GitHub, Bitbucket, or StackOverflow profile, or some sample code, articles, or presentations you’ve created, or even just reporting bugs on open source projects. We're looking for something to help us learn how you contribute to a team.