Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. OpenAlex is a nonprofit technology organization building an open universal research library for humans and machines. The Software Engineer will work across the backend stack, owning ETL pipelines, AI and machine learning systems, APIs, applications, and technical user support while identifying, building, shipping, and supporting needed improvements.
Responsibilities
- 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
- You'll notice what's missing, propose it, build it, ship it, and answer the tickets about it
- Managing AI agents that write code
Skills
- You've built and run data systems at real scale using Python and SQL
- 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
- Bonus: Spark and Databricks
Benefits
- Creative autonomy
Company Overview