OpenAlex careers: remote jobs, culture and where they hire

As a nonprofit, OurResearch runs on grants and earned revenue rather than venture capital. Arcadia, the charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, has been the anchor funder: an $850,000 award in 2018, a 3-year $4.5M grant in June 2021 that launched OpenAlex, and a 5-year $7.5M grant announced in March 2024 to establish it as sustainable open infrastructure. Revenue also comes from OpenAlex Premium API subscriptions and institutional Member, Member+ and Partner tiers, and Wellcome funds its work on an open database of research funding.

OpenAlex is a free and open catalog of the world's scholarly research: half a billion works linked to authors, institutions, sources and topics, all CC0-licensed and available through a web app, API and bulk download. It launched in beta on January 3, 2022 as the successor to Microsoft Academic Graph, and traffic now runs about a billion API calls per month from universities, governments and AI companies. The team pitches it as a universal research library inspired by the ancient Library of Alexandria, open to both humans and machines.

Behind it is OurResearch, a small nonprofit that has built open scholarly infrastructure since 2011, including Unpaywall (an open index of open access papers) and Unsub (a journal subscription analysis tool for librarians), both of which now run on OpenAlex data. As of October 2026 the paid staff is five people: CEO Jason Priem, CTO Casey Meyer, COO Kyle Demes, a software and data engineer, and a part-time sales lead, supported by volunteer boards. The organization is funded by grants plus earned revenue from API subscriptions and institutional supporters.

Jason Priem, Co-founder and CEO. Co-founded the nonprofit (then called Impactstory, renamed Our Research in 2019) with Heather Piwowar after they met at an all-night hackathon in 2011. A former information science PhD student at UNC-Chapel Hill and a coiner of the term altmetrics, he has led the organization through Unpaywall, Unsub and OpenAlex, and remains CEO and a board member.

Heather Piwowar, Co-founder. Open science researcher known for her work on research data sharing and reuse; co-founded Impactstory with Priem in 2011 and co-built Unpaywall and Unsub. She is not listed on the OpenAlex staff page as of October 2026.

The engineering job is unusually broad: you work across the whole backend and own what you touch, reporting directly to the CTO. That spans the ETL harvesting metadata from thousands of repositories into the bronze and silver layers of a Databricks pipeline, the AI and ML that make the data good (author name disambiguation, topic classification, institution disambiguation, full-text extraction from PDFs), and the API and app layer of Elasticsearch, Python and Cloudflare Workers serving millions of people. There is no platform team beneath you and no product team above you: you notice what is missing, propose it, build it, ship it, and answer the tickets about it.

The posting is explicit that this is an AI-native shop where agents write all the code, and managing them is increasingly the job: not typing, but judgment and agency, knowing what to build, when it is right and when it is done. The mission side is real too: as the posting puts it, your favorite AI company probably uses OpenAlex, and your favorite university definitely does.

The team describes a small-team culture valuing trust, agency and impact, and is blunt about the trade-offs: the tempo is relentless, nothing is ever really done, and no one is holding your hand, but the work stays interesting and comes with creative autonomy. The support queue is shared across the whole team; hard technical questions land on the engineer who understands the system, and answering them is framed as how you find out what to build next.

The hiring pages ask for people who are relentlessly resourceful and who play jazz, not classical: confident in their skills, comfortable improvising with a team, and able to embrace ambiguity and imperfection. For the engineering role specifically they want experience running data systems at real scale with Python and SQL (Spark and Databricks a bonus) and a genuine taste for messy data, which they note is the only kind they get.

As of October 2026 there are three openings at https://openalex.org/jobs: Software Engineer (full-time, remote, two positions per the September 2026 Hacker News post), Community Lead (full-time, remote) and Operations Associate (full-time, remote, US or Canada only). The Software Engineer posting publishes a $150,000 to $200,000 USD range. Applications go through a form on the site and require creating a free OpenAlex account first.

The published hiring process has five steps: application, screening interview, in-depth interview, a one-day paid work trial, and offer. The application asks three essay questions (why you want to work here, what you would do in your first week, and the coolest thing you have ever built), says answers of three to six paragraphs work well, explicitly allows using AI to write them, and promises a reply either way.