Description
Overleaf is looking for an outstanding Product Specialist to help us continue to provide first-class support to our growing community, focused on the support and onboarding of our institutional and enterprise customers. This is a remote, full-time role, ideally based in either the UK or EU.
Who we are
Overleaf is a startup and social enterprise that builds modern collaborative authoring tools for scientists — like Google Docs for Science. Our primary product is an online, real time collaborative editor for papers, theses, technical reports and other documents written in the LaTeX markup language.
Overleaf has seen rapid adoption across science and research, and now supports a community of over six million users worldwide. This community includes major institutions such as Stanford and Caltech, with Overleaf becoming an integral part not only of research collaborations but also of undergraduate teaching. Many large international tech companies and labs use our enterprise solutions, and we work with several major publishers: for example, supporting collaboration on IEEE’s member platform, and making the journal submission process smoother for LaTeX users across many academic publishers.
Overleaf was founded by two mathematicians who were inspired by their own experiences in academia to create a better solution for scientific collaboration and communication. Now we are a team of forty, based mainly in and around the UK and in the US. We were recognised as one of the
UK's top 100 fastest growing businesses in 2018.
How we work
Overleaf is remote-first — all founders and staff work remotely. Our main office is located in London, UK, and we aim to get the whole team together in London a couple of times a year for face-to-face time, Coronavirus permitting.
We encourage flexible working. Our core hours are 2pm–5pm UK time.
About this role
As a product specialist, your main focus will be on supporting our institutional and enterprise (B2B) customers, from pre-sales through to onboarding and then operation.
This is a highly technical role, involving a detailed understanding of how to install (for on-premise editions), configure, operate and troubleshoot our products, and how to integrate them with customer IT systems and processes. In particular, you would:
- Support both our cloud-hosted service on www.overleaf.com and also our customers who have installed Overleaf on-premise. Overleaf is substantially open source (https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf) and can be self-hosted; we have both a free Community Edition and a ‘Server Pro’ edition, which is officially supported.
- Help us meet our customers’ security and compliance requirements during procurement, for example by filling out security and accessibility questionnaires.
- Oversee the onboarding of new B2B customers, including implementation schedules and timelines, tracking of outstanding items and project risks and escalation of issues.
- Support on-premise deployments, including:
- Drafting / standardizing deployment plans
- Coordinating tasks and execution of deployment plans internally with sales, marketing, product and support, as well as with the customer
- Supporting the preparation of documentation for deployments and trainings
- Doing customer trainings as needed
- Work closely with the product and development teams to ensure that customer feedback makes it back into our roadmapping process.
- Write and update documentation to help our customers self-support where possible.
Product specialists sit within the support team and also help with providing support to end users as part of our support rotation, which covers (nearly) all timezones.
As product specialist you will have the opportunity to interact with multiple customer segments including corporate, government, academic institutions and scholarly publishers. In addition to working with multiple product groups within the Overleaf team, you will have the chance to interact with the broader portfolio of Digital Science products and solutions.
The following technical skills are desirable (but not required, provided you want to learn them!):
- LaTeX --- our end users are mostly LaTeX users, and so are we for many internal documents, so familiarity with LaTeX will be helpful in many ways.
- Single Sign On with SAML and LDAP --- we provide SSO for institutional and enterprise customers, which requires customer-specific configuration and setup.
- Docker and Docker Compose --- we distribute Overleaf’s on-premise editions as Docker containers, orchestrated with Compose.
- Linux --- many of our on-premise customers run Linux, so familiarity with the shell, file permissions, firewalls and network configuration will be helpful.
- Compliance and security --- encryption, authentication, authorization, data controllers, processors and sub-processors, RPOs and RTOs are examples of terms you will encounter.
Important soft skills include:
- Excellent written English --- most of our support is conducted via email.
- Politeness and professionalism --- these are some of our core values.
- Commercial awareness --- you will be interacting with our customers and involved in pre-sales discussions.
How we hire
The stages in our hiring process are typically:
- We will aim to update you on the status of your application within one week from when we receive it.
- We'll follow up by email (or sometimes schedule a phone call) with any questions we have about your application, usually around logistics, your ambitions and your expectations about the role.
- We'll schedule a more in-depth interview, which is typically two hours long. The first hour is discussion, and the second hour is practical. For the practical, you'll have the option of either completing a homework assignment, which requires about one hour of your time before the interview, or doing an exercise during the interview, if you prefer. The exercises are practical in nature, and you can use Google, etc., and ask us questions.
- We'll make an offer. We usually interview in batches, so there may be a short delay while we interview other candidates, but we will try to keep you informed throughout the process.
- If you have a deadline, please let us know in your application, and we will try to be accommodating.
Requirements
We require that you:
- have a minimum of 2-3 years of relevant experience (we’re not taking on new graduates right now)
- work for us full time (or nearly full time)
- will usually be available in our core hours, 2pm -- 5pm UK time
- travel occasionally, to meet with colleagues and customers, and to represent Overleaf at conferences
- be available for an infrequent (10x/yr) weekend call rotation
Benefits
This is a paid, full-time position. You can work from anywhere, ideally based in either the UK or EU, and salary will be based on experience. Benefits include:
- Remote and flexible working.
- You would join a small, dedicated, and growing team.
- We're part of Digital Science (https://www.digital-science.com/) and backed by Bethnal Green Ventures (https://bethnalgreenventures.com/), through which we're part of a wider community of startups in science, health and ed-tech.
- You can pick your own equipment. MacBook Pro? Lenovo ThinkPad? Notebook and pen? However you like to work, we'll provide what you need.
- We provide a training budget; many of our staff choose to attend relevant industry conferences or buy training materials.
- We run a biweekly internal seminar series (show and tell) with short talks from staff about their work or personal projects, new technologies and techniques.
- As Overleaf is a fast-growing company, there will also be opportunities for the person hired for this position to grow and develop, and to take on additional responsibility, if desired.
We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.