Would you like to help shape the future of open infrastructure that serves as the backbone of global scholarly communication? Join Crossref as the Head of Infrastructure Services.
We’re looking for a Head of Infrastructure Services to lead the strategy and evolution of Crossref’s infrastructure ecosystem, and keep our systems reliable, scalable, secure, observable, and resilient. You’ll lead and develop a high-performing Infrastructure Services Team, assuming ownership of infrastructure operations and incident management.
Our open infrastructure connects thousands of scholarly publishers and millions of research outputs, serving an increasingly diverse set of communities across scholarly publishing, research, funding, and beyond. Our system is a complex mix of legacy and modern components, some parts over 20 years old and tightly coupled. You’ll play a key role in our efforts to modernise this system into a set of more loosely connected services.
As part of this role, you’ll own the infrastructure roadmap, working closely within the Technology Team and with Programs & Services Team to enable effective service delivery and strike the right balance between maintenance, improvement, and innovation. We’re also looking for you to be an active voice in our Tech Leadership Group, contributing to our broader strategy, planning and priority setting across the organisation.
This role sits at the intersection of hands-on technical oversight and people leadership. We are looking for someone who is as comfortable in the weeds of cloud infrastructure as they are leading a team - with empathy, mentorship, clear communication, and the confidence to negotiate priorities across the organisation and hold their ground when it matters. If you’ve grown from a strong technical background into a leadership role, and you enjoy using your technical expertise to lead a team more effectively, this is a role built for you.
Essential skills and experience:
Nice to have:
Weâre a non-profit membership organisation that exists to make scholarly communications better. We rally the community; tag and share metadata; run an open infrastructure; play with technology; and make tools and servicesâall to help put research in context.
We envision a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society. We are working towards this vision of a âResearch Nexusâ by demonstrating the value of richer and connected open metadata, incentivising people to meet best practices, while making it easier to do so. âWeâ means 24,000+ members from 167+ countries, 170+ million records, and nearly 2 billion monthly metadata queries from thousands of tools across the research ecosystem. We want to be a sustainable source of complete, open, and global scholarly metadata and relationships.
Take a look at our strategic agenda to see the planned work that aims to achieve the vision. The sustainability area aims to make transparent all the processes and procedures we follow to run the operation long-term, including our financials and our ongoing commitment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). The governance area describes our board and its role in community oversight.
It also takes a strong team â because reliable infrastructure needs committed people who contribute to and realise the vision, and thrive doing it. We are a distributed group of 60+ dedicated people who take our work seriously, but don’t take ourselves seriously - we like to play quizzes, measure coffee intake, and create 100s of custom slack emojis. We do this through fair policies and working practices, a balanced approach to resourcing, and accountability to each other.
We can offer the successful candidate a challenging and fun environment to work in. Together we are dedicated to our global mission and we are constantly adapting to ensure we get there. Take a look at our organisation chart, the latest Annual Meeting recordings, and our financial information.
We especially encourage applications from people with backgrounds historically under-represented in research and scholarly communications. You can be based anywhere in the world where we can employ staff, either directly or through an employer of record.
We will invite selected candidates to an initial call to discuss the role. Following that, shortlisted candidates will be invited to a technical interview. This will be followed by a short (1-2 hours) take-home assignment. The last step will be a panel interview, where you will receive questions in advance. All interviews will be held remotely on Zoom.
Click here to apply!
Please strive to submit your application by September 22nd, 2026.
Crossref is committed to a policy of non-discrimination and equal opportunity for all employees and qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, colour, religion, sex, pregnancy or a condition related to pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, uniform service member status, or any other protected class under applicable law. Crossref will make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with known disabilities in accordance with applicable law.
