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, Monday-Friday
• Remuneration: 90k USD or local equivalent. We pay salaries in the currency of the country in which you’re based. We arrive at the local USD-equivalent salary by determining the average 5-year USD exchange rate, to stabilize currency fluctuations.
• Benefits: Check out our Employee Handbook for more details on paid time off, unlimited sick time, paid parental and medical leaves, and more.
• Reports to: Head of Infrastructure Services, Stewart Houten
• Timeline: Advertise in April-May and offer by June.

About the role

We are looking for a DevOps Engineer to help operate and evolve a large-scale scholarly infrastructure platform. This is a hands-on role focused on improving reliability, observability, and scalability across a mix of legacy and modern systems.

You will spend much of your time understanding how systems behave in production, diagnosing issues, and making incremental improvements. Alongside this, you will help guide the platform towards more maintainable, cloud-aligned architectures over time.

While much of the work involves improving existing systems, we are also building new services and infrastructure using more modern approaches. You will have the opportunity to contribute to these efforts and shape how the platform evolves.

This is not a greenfield, cloud-native environment. You should be comfortable working in systems that are evolving, not fully standardised, and sometimes difficult to reason about. Progress is often gradual, and the role requires persistence, curiosity, and sound engineering judgement.

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.

Key responsibilities

• Diagnose and resolve production issues across infrastructure, application, and database layers, often with incomplete information.
• Investigate performance problems (eg slow queries, JVM behaviour, network latency)
• Operate and maintain a mixed environment of long-lived EC2 instances and newer AWS services.
• Reduce operational toil by identifying repeatable tasks and automating them with infrastructure-as-code.
• Improve observability by working with developers to expose metrics, logs, and traces.
• Contribute to incident response and post-incident reviews with a focus on learning and prevention.
• Make incremental improvements to legacy systems to improve reliability and reduce operational complexity over time.
• Support and guide developers in building systems that are easier to run, debug, and operate in production.
• Contribute to the design of new services and infrastructure, balancing modern practices with the realities of the existing platform.
• Maintain and improve infrastructure definitions (Terraform/Ansible) with a focus on reducing complexity and improving repeatability.

About you

• You enjoy understanding how systems behave in production, not just how they are designed to work.
• You are comfortable working in an environment that is not fully standardised or modernised, and you take satisfaction in making incremental improvements.
• You are persistent and methodical when diagnosing problems. You are able to follow issues across system boundaries until you identify the root cause.
• You are pragmatic in your decision making, balancing immediate needs with longer-term improvements.
• You value clear documentation and runbooks, and use them to make systems easier to understand and operate over time.
• You work well in a small, distributed team, taking ownership of problems independently, while collaborating and consulting with others when needed.
• You don’t need to have seen everything before, but you should be comfortable figuring things out when you haven’t.

Essential skills and experience:

• Minimum 5 years of experience in DevOps, Systems Administration, SRE, or related engineering field.
• Strong Linux systems knowledge and fluency in native tooling for diagnosing system issues.
• Comfortable operating services in a cloud or virtualised environment (AWS, GCP, Azure, or similar).
• Fluent in writing scripts or automation (Bash, Python, Ansible) with a focus on reducing manual work.
• Enthusiastic about infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, OpenTofu, or similar) and invested in improving how infrastructure is managed.
• Good understanding of web infrastructure, the HTTP request flow, including how requests move through load balancers, proxies, and application layers.

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

• Building and running CI/CD pipelines
• JVM-based systems (eg Java, Clojure)
• Relational databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL
• Distributed search systems such as ElasticSearch / OpenSearch
• Container management (Fargate, Kubernetes)
• Message queues (SQS, ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ)
• Monitoring and observability (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, CloudWatch)
• Background in scholarly communications and/or open infrastructure/open metadata
• Experience in the non-profit sector or with community-led organisations

About Crossref and the team

We’re a non-profit 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 24,000+ members from 166+ countries, 170+ 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 56+ dedicated people who take our work seriously, but don’t take ourselves seriously - we like to play quizzes, measure coffee intake, and create 100s of custom slack emojis. 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.

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, talk through their background, and explore how their experience aligns with the work we do. Following this, shortlisted candidates will be invited to a technical interview with members of the DevOps team. This will not involve a take-home technical exercise, but it will include some technical discussion to understand your problem-solving approach and how you think about operating infrastructure services. The final stage will involve a broader group from across the organisation, for which questions will be shared in advance to give you time to prepare.

All interviews will be held remotely on Zoom.

Click here to apply!

Applications close on May 5th, 2026.

Anticipated salary for this role is 90k USD-equivalent, paid in local currency. We calculate the local salary by using the five-year average exchange rate between your currency and USD. This helps balance out exchange rate fluctuations.

Crossref offers competitive compensation, benefits, flexible work arrangements, professional development opportunities, and a supportive work environment. Check out our Employee Handbook for more details on paid time off, unlimited sick time, paid parental and medical leaves, and more.

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!