SOFTWARE DEVELOPER

We’re looking for a mid to senior Ruby developer to join our team.

Altmetric analyses the online activity around scholarly content to measure the broader impact of science and research. We deliver and support products such as the Altmetric details pages, Altmetric Explorer and the Altmetric badges. Our customers include institutions across Europe, North America and Australia and scholarly publishers such as Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis and MIT Press.

We develop software in a friendly and flexible working environment, processing hundreds of thousands of scholarly mentions and serving over 22 million API requests every day.

We’re currently based at Kings Place, in Kings Cross. As a portfolio company of Digital Science & Research Solutions Ltd, we share our office with other scientific start-ups including figshare, Overleaf & Symplectic.

You’ll need production experience with:

• Web applications using Ruby and the Ruby on Rails framework (experience with other languages and frameworks would be beneficial);
• Data and databases; either document-based, key-value or relational such as MongoDB, Redis and PostgreSQL(experience with all of them not necessary as we can teach you the differences in practice);
• Software development in a team including automated testing and code review.

Ultimately, we’re looking for people who are keen to learn and flexible in their approach.

You will be part of a team responsible for the development and maintenance of our user-facing web applications and data pipeline. Using best practices, you will continuously deliver our products to customers around the globe and shape our engineering culture.

Examples of our recent projects include:

• Redeveloping our policy document system in Ruby to mine PDFs for references to scholarly literature and push them through the Altmetric pipeline to reveal policy attention to science;
• Launching version 2 of Altmetric Explorer for Institutions, allowing users to search and analyse the full Altmetric database with over 52 million mentions of 12 million research outputs;
• Adding Shibboleth authentication to Altmetric Explorer for Institutions, allowing institutional users to use their existing user accounts and ensuring a seamless and secure user experience.

Development team

Our development team is divided into multidisciplinary product teams, each empowered to deploy to our infrastructure multiple times a day. We hold weekly “gatherings” across the whole development team to keep everyone informed and to discuss any bigger issues that affect multiple project teams. 

Teams typically work in two week iterations, seeking feedback early and often so that we can respond to change quickly. At the end of every iteration, we hold reviews and retrospectives so that we can share completed work and discuss changes to our way of working.

Life at Altmetric

As a company, work-life balance is very important to us: we have flexible working hours and our teams are setup to enable people to regularly work from home.

In order to create time for personal development, we hold “hack afternoons” every two weeks for team members to explore new topics and technologies and work with people outside their usual product team.

We offer a competitive market rate salary and all members of the team are provided with a MacBook Pro (we are happy to discuss your requirements before you join) and have an annual training & conference budget including international travel. We are users of open source software and we support this in any way we can. We also offer company benefits such as a personal pension plan, life assurance cover, childcare vouchers, private medical insurance and a travel or bike loan.