Summary

openRxiv, the organization behind the leading preprint servers for the biological and health sciences, is seeking an Engineering Manager to help our tech team manage and update our core infrastructure, implement engineering best practices, and plan for our next phase of growth and innovation. We’re looking for someone passionate about building/maintaining high-quality infrastructure who will thrive in a hybrid role that blends day-to-day engineering and architectural work with establishing best practices, managing and mentoring our team, and working closely with our Head of Product and members of our leadership to implement our technology strategy and increase our organization’s technical capacity.

About openRxiv

openRxiv, a newly established nonprofit, was launched in March, 2025 to oversee bioRxiv and medRxiv, the leading preprint servers for the biological and health sciences, and broaden access to scientific communication. bioRxiv and medRxiv post more than 62,000 preprints per year and have transformed how scientific discoveries are shared, enabling researchers worldwide to disseminate their findings rapidly and openly.

Why join openRxiv? This is a rare opportunity to help establish the core technical culture and processes at an organization at the forefront of scientific communication, ensuring that scientific discoveries are broadly accessible to the world and better enabling communication at the speed of science. Our small, but dedicated technical team has long exceeded expectations in a resource-constrained environment by building a collection of core tools that enhance our vendor platforms and working strategically with innovative partners to integrate with their systems. 

Now, we have the opportunity to build on this foundation and increase our technical capacity to accomplish our mission. As our first Engineering Manager, you’ll work with a fully remote team to manage day-to-day development, assess and update our technical infrastructure for the future, establish engineering best practices, and work closely with our Head of Product and leadership to build a cutting-edge engineering culture.

About The Role

• Reporting directly to the CEO, partner closely with the CEO, Head of Product, and other members of leadership to assess technical needs, translate organizational strategy into technical priorities, and plan for and implement future enhancements, migrations, and team growth required to achieve our goals.
• Own the long-term architectural planning for openRxiv’s infrastructure and serve as the organization’s senior technical leader. 
• Oversee assignment, development, testing, and deployment of our core systems in consultation with our leadership team and Head of Product — including hands-on development where needed.
• Manage and lead a small, and growing, technical team of engineers and project managers, providing direction, support, and mentoring. 
• Work with the technical team to build a strong engineering culture by designing, implementing, and iterating on engineering best practices like agile sprint planning, version control, continuous integration and deployment, code review, and documentation.
• Help our leadership team and Head of Product assess technical needs, potential partnerships, and grant and revenue opportunities.

About You

• You have significant professional experience developing and architecting high-performance web applications across the full stack, in multiple programming languages.
• You have significant professional experience designing and managing reliable cloud infrastructure, including deployment, access, health and uptime monitoring, and spend monitoring and management.
• You know how to architect, build, and document secure, performant systems that serve millions of monthly users.
• You use AI coding tools regularly and think carefully and critically about how and when teams should deploy them to most effectively boost productivity without compromising on code quality and skill development, and how to measure those outcomes.
• You get as much satisfaction from making architectural improvements, documenting how they work, and measuring the results of them as you do from shipping new user-facing features.
• You’ve helped teams implement, iterate on, and measure the success of agile engineering best practices like version control, testing, continuous integration and deployment, documentation, stand-ups, retrospectives, etc.
• You have experience managing engineers and delight in supporting them in learning, overcoming roadblocks, and achieving their day-to-day and long-term career goals.
• You’re excited to work for a mission-driven organization that’s building tools to advance open science.
• You excel working in startup environments with high degrees of autonomy and want the space to experiment and innovate without losing sight of an active user base that expects consistency.
• You align with our values, bringing integrity to your decisions and relationships, collaborating generously with others, staying curious and open to learning, taking stewardship seriously by considering the impact of your work, and bringing ambition to pursuing meaningful goals and creating lasting impact.
• Bonus: you have successfully migrated a production application from on-prem to cloud infrastructure.

What Success Could Look Like

Here’s an example of the kinds of work we expect the Engineering Manager to accomplish in their first 90 days. This includes our immediate near-term goal of moving our owned and operated infrastructure to the cloud, but is just an example. We also expect a successful candidate to bring their own vision and strengths to the role.

First 30 Days: Learn and Build Trust

• Meet our technical team and start to develop managerial relationships with them
• Meet other organizational stakeholders and begin to understand them and their needs
• Learn the basics of our core systems and infrastructure
• Learn about our key vendor systems
• Learn about the open science ecosystem, our key partnerships, and our mission, vision, and values.

30-60 Days: Plan and Make Initial Contributions

• Take on a few small coding projects and make your first contributions.
• Help the tech team establish and document basic version control, deployment, and sprint process best practices.
• Work with our Lead Engineer and Head of Product to flesh out our technical roadmap in a way that aligns with our capacity, mission, and goals.
• Work with the team to develop an architecture diagram.
• Work with the team to develop cloud based recovery plans. 
• Develop goals, expectations, and career plans with direct reports.

60-90 Days: Chart a Path Forward

• Take full ownership of day-to-day development.
• Retrospect on the initial process improvements and, working with the team, solidify and document the process you’ve implemented.
• Working with our Head of Product, Lead Engineer and leadership, develop team goals for the rest of the year.
• Contribute technical and architectural insights to our needs assessment as we consider the future of our vendor systems and infrastructure.

Compensation, Benefits, and Work Environment

Competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits will be provided including medical, dental, and vision coverage; life insurance; a 403(b) retirement savings plan; and paid vacation plus federal holidays.

The position is remote, and based in the U.S or some international countries. Some travel is expected. The Engineering Manager must be flexible to work across US time zones.

A Note to Candidates

Not sure you meet 100% of the qualifications? Research shows that women and people from underrepresented groups may be less likely to apply for jobs if they do not match each requirement. If your experience is close to what you see here, please consider applying. 

openRxiv is an equal opportunity employer; and committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment for all employees. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. We believe that a team with a variety of backgrounds and experiences will help us grow and better serve the global scientific community.