Full-Stack Developer

Zotero is a powerful, easy-to-use research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources and then share the results of your research.

The Zotero team is looking for a full-time, contract developer to work across the Zotero ecosystem. Your job will be, most simply, to make Zotero as good as it can be, working on any part of the project to help advance that goal. This position is for someone with a wide range of skills: you should be comfortable obsessing over a stray pixel in a user interface or designing a syncing architecture from scratch. Your work might include improving the Zotero desktop software and browser extensions, extending the Zotero web API, managing an extensive AWS infrastructure, or building back-end services to power new features. As part of a small team, you’ll have responsibility over core components of the project and the freedom to experiment and find creative solutions to tough problems. (Think an Elasticsearch cluster is the best way to do something? Let’s spin up some instances. Have an idea for a major new feature or project? Let’s talk about it.) Most importantly, you’ll participate in a vibrant global open-source community with amazing community developers and passionate users. The core Zotero development team meets periodically in person (conference room in Virginia, falafel joint in Paris, cafe in New York City), but you’ll primarily be working remotely, communicating with Zotero developers and users via chat rooms, forums, mailing lists, and GitHub. We have a highly collaborative but asynchronous workflow, and you’ll be in control of your own schedule. Our hours are flexible and variable: we might be debating a new feature at 1 p.m. or deploying a major upgrade at 1 a.m.

- Extensive experience with JavaScript and PHP (don’t worry, we don’t like PHP either, but we have existing code that uses it; for recent projects we’ve used JavaScript/ES6, Python, and Go) - Experience working with and/or developing web APIs - Experience managing Linux systems and services - Strong attention to privacy and security issues - A love of free and open-source software - Strong communication skills — we discuss and debate nearly everything we do, so it’s critical that you can (and want to!) take part in that Bonus Points - Previous remote work experience - Experience building user-facing software - Experience with open-source infrastructure software: Node.js, MySQL, Memcached, Redis, Elasticsearch, Ansible, etc. - Experience with Amazon Web Services