Summary
✨ AI‑Generated
A backend-focused engineering role involving large-scale data processing, AI-driven features, APIs, and infrastructure. The engineer will have broad ownership and work across multiple layers of a technical platform.
Highlights
Opportunity to own backend systems, work across data pipelines and AI capabilities, and collaborate closely with users and technical leadership.
Description
The role You'll work across the whole backend stack, and you'll own what you touch.
You'll report to our CTO and work closely with the rest of our small team and our users.
Your main areas of work:
The ETL.
Harvesting metadata from thousands of repositories and idiosyncratic indexes and cleaning it into shape — the bronze and silver layers of our Databricks pipeline.The AI and ML that make the data good.
Author name disambiguation, topic classification, institution disambiguation, full-text extraction from PDFs — the gold layer.The API and the app.
Elasticsearch, Python, Cloudflare Workers: everything except the actual front-end code, serving millions of people and a growing number of agents every day.Our users.
Our support queue is shared across the team; the hard technical questions land on the engineer who understands the system, and answering them is how you find out what to build next.There's no platform team beneath you and no product team above you: you'll notice what's missing, propose it, build it, ship it, and answer the tickets about it.
We're an AI-native shop: agents write all our code, and increasingly managing them is the job — not typing, but good judgment and high agency.
Knowing what to build, knowing when it's right, and knowing when it's done.
About us Inspired by the ancient Library of Alexandria, we're building a universal research library.
And by making it open to humans and machines, we're supporting a new scientific revolution.
We'd love your help.
As a nonprofit, we're driven by mission.
As a tech company, we're working at scale: a billion API calls monthly, and millions of users across enterprise, government, and academia.
Your favorite AI company probably uses OpenAlex; your favorite university definitely does.
Our small-team culture values trust, agency, and impact.
The tempo's relentless, nothing's ever really done, and no one's holding your hand.
But the work stays interesting, we have creative autonomy, and we ship.
Every day.
About you You're relentlessly resourceful (as pg puts it).
You've got the smarts to outwit the impossible problems, the grit to power through the grindy ones, and the wisdom to tell the difference.
You get things done.
You play jazz, not classical: you're confident in your skills, love improvising with a team, and can embrace ambiguity and imperfection in service of emergent, collaborative creativity.
You believe in our mission and you care about openness and open culture.
That extends to how you communicate: with skill, empathy, and clarity.
And for this role specifically:
You've built and run data systems at real scale using Python and SQL.
Bonus: Spark and Databricks.You're comfortable anywhere in the backend stack, moving smoothly between data, code, models, and APIs.You love working with messy data — that's the only kind we get.
