We're Hiring
Our Mission
We're building an open-science platform to bring the world's research online, available to all, for free. With over 73 million registered users, Academia is rapidly transforming the way researchers share their work. We're a small team of 40 people passionate about building great software to open up science. In 2016 we raised $11 million to fuel the growth of the platform and the team.
Perks & Benefits
Our Team
RICHARD PRICE
Chief Executive Officer
BEN LUND
Chief Technology Officer
NATE SULLIVAN
Director of Product Engineering
YURI NIYAZOV
Director of Infrastructure Engineering
PAT BRINICH-LANGLOIS
Senior Software Engineer
STUART LIROFF
VP of Talent
ALEXEY CHERNIKOV
Senior Software Engineer
BRYNN GITT
Senior Software Engineer
MICHAEL MORTONSON
Head of Data Science
HANNAH EHRLICH
User Operations
ZACH FOSTER
Senior Product Manager
MAX SCHWARTZ
Director of Design
CLARA NEES
Software Engineer
KAI DANIELS
Product Designer
KARI HILL
People Operations Lead
AHMAD SANAD
Software Engineer
MITCHELL FOX
Chief Operating Officer
DAVIS VU
Software Engineer
NICK RUTHERFORD
Software Engineer
HELEN QU
Software Engineer
DANIA DURNAS
Software Engineer
JAMES PETTIT
Senior Software Engineer
JAMES FISCHER
Software Engineer
DAVID YORK
Mobile Lead
ISAAC PARK
Software Engineer
JACOB SIEBERT
Software Engineer
ISABEL ZHANG
Software Engineer
NICK MEYER
Software Engineer
NICK WHITE
Software Engineer
JACK FLEMING
Product Designer
AIDAN HODGE
Software Engineer
WILLIAM DOYLE-CAPITMAN
Senior Product Manager
LYNN ZHOU
Software Engineer
ALEX WHEDON
Data Scientist
SENA KOLEVA
Head of User Research
MICHAEL MARABLE
Office Administrator
ADI RAVAL
VP of Communications
THOMAS RING
Software Engineer
ANDREA MARTINEZ
Product Manager
OLIVIA TREWIN
Software EngineerOpen Positions
DATA SCIENTIST
Data Scientist
San Francisco
Academia is looking for an experienced Data Scientist skilled at building and deploying predictive models and performing deep statistical analyses to support and accelerate our growth initiatives.
In this role you will partner with our revenue conversion, growth and engineering teams to build and deploy models and conduct analyses that enable Academia to grow users and revenue faster and more efficiently. You will be a core contributor to building our data science practice!
The Data Science team leverages Academia’s data to deliver insights for our customers and inform product direction and decision-making. We operate full-stack, conducting analyses, prototyping and deploying predictive models and statistical tools both for internal use and for our customers.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
* Build and deploy models that can be used for forecasting and optimization, in areas such as:
* Predicting lead and customer value (conversion, churn, growth, etc.)
* Targeting upsell of additional products and product tiers both in-app and through marketing efforts
* Develop reusable statistical tools for tracking and analyzing growth experiments
* Conduct ad hoc statistical analyses and deep dives into our data to support Academia’s growth and revenue conversion
* Enhance and contribute to the team’s core analysis and modeling systems and libraries
* Present and communicate results across the company
* Identify new opportunities to leverage data to improve Academia’s products and help our business
Here’s what we’re looking for:
* Recent college grad or preferred 2+ years’ experience conducting statistical analyses on large datasets, ideally in an internet consumer business context (can supplement with academic experience where appropriate)
* Experience applying a variety of statistical and modeling techniques using Python, R or another statistical modeling language, as indicated by familiarity with many of the following techniques - generalized linear modeling, regularization, ensemble models (e.g., random forest, gradient boosting), Bayesian analysis methods, time series analysis, hierarchical modeling, and Monte Carlo methods.
* Strong programming skills - comfortable with all phases of the data science development process, from data collection all the way through to deployment
* Excellent communication skills - able to effectively deliver findings and recommendations to non-technical stakeholders in a clear and compelling fashion
* PhD or Masters is a plus
* Experience designing valid controlled experiments and conducting robust analyses on the resulting data.
The Academia Story
Academia’s mission is to make every academic paper ever published available for free online.
Our site accelerates research and supports critical breakthroughs in all areas of research by allowing academics to publish and share their own work. Not only do these academics share their own research, they can use our platform to monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow.
Over 72 million academics are Academia.edu members, and have added 34 million papers. Academia.edu attracts over 30 million unique visitors a month, and has attracted investment of more than $34 million from leading VC firms including Khosla Ventures, True Ventures, Spark Capital and Tencent. Our work has garnered favorable attention from trade and mainstream media including Fortune, Wired, EdTech, Venture Beat, San Francisco Business Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, TechCrunch, Scientific American and Forbes. We have 42 employees and 26 in engineering.
Academia is turning cash flow positive; our revenue run rate is growing rapidly.
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.
APPLY
SENIOR PRODUCT DESIGNER
Senior Product Designer
San Francisco
Senior Product Designer
Academia’s mission is to make every research paper available for free for everyone in the world. So far our 72 million users have uploaded about one third of all research papers ever written and there have been over 2 billion downloads. We’re pretty excited about that!
Problems like climate change, political conflict and social inequality can only be solved through intensive collaboration. That’s why we built a network to allow researchers to share, discover, and collaborate on new research from around the world. We love creating the experiences that enable new researchers to be discovered, and established researchers to reach new audiences.
So if you want to help all people access the world’s latest research, and help researchers connect and collaborate, keep reading!
What will you get?
In addition to finding great talent for our tight-knit team, we value fostering employee growth. Our 41-person team values curiosity, initiative, teamwork, and we are passionate about building great products. We are turning cash flow positive and our revenue run rate is growing rapidly. We have an employee-focused benefits program that includes top notch health, dental, and vision insurance, a generous time off policy (21-days paid vacation, 11 federal paid holidays, and unlimited sick days), stock options, catered lunch, a stocked kitchen, and a book stipend. We’re located near MUNI & BART in beautiful downtown San Francisco.
Responsibilities
* Own large design projects (exploring mobile experiences, contributing to a design system, revolutionizing peer review and publishing, helping researchers showcase their work)
* Work quickly and effectively on multiple projects.
* Ship new features, bug fixes, and small improvements multiple times a week.
* Work directly with our engineers, delivering them product specs and assets
* Work directly with other designers to envision and iterate concepts
* Contribute to high-level strategic decisions with the rest of the team
* Deliver mockups and high-fidelity user interfaces
* Prototype concepts in Invision (we also like Webflow for live CSS/HTML prototypes)
Requirements
* 5+ years of Product Design (User Experience, Interaction Design)
* A strong design background with an obsessive eye to interaction details
* Experience designing for web and mobile applications
* Ability to think at a high level about product strategy and vision
* Self-motivated and able to efficiently run with a project without close supervision
* Basic knowledge of HTML & CSS.
* Excellent communication skills—you should be able to clearly articulate your design decisions
* Bachelor's Degree
Bonus Skills
* User research experience—formative and validation/usability testing
* Experience with Webflow or other prototyping tools
* Experience building and evolving a Design System
* Experience with effective A/B testing
* Using quantitative data to influence design decisions
* Master’s Degree in HCI
The Academia Story
Academia’s mission is to make every academic paper ever published available for free online.
Our site accelerates research and supports critical breakthroughs in all areas of research by allowing academics to publish and share their own work. Not only do these academics share their own research, they can use our platform to monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow.
Over 72 million academics are Academia.edu members, and have added 34 million papers. Academia.edu attracts over 30 million unique visitors a month, and has attracted investment of more than $34 million from leading VC firms including Khosla Ventures, True Ventures, Spark Capital and Tencent. Our work has garnered favorable attention from trade and mainstream media including Fortune, Wired, EdTech, Venture Beat, San Francisco Business Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, TechCrunch, Scientific American and Forbes.
Academia is turning cash flow positive and revenue growth is rapid. We have 41 employees at our San Francisco Office, with 24 in engineering.
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.
APPLY
FULL-STACK SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Full-stack Software Engineer
San Francisco
Academia is looking for a Full-Stack Software Engineer to join our team!
What we're looking for
Our ideal candidates are not only great at what they do, but they also make a meaningful impact on our mission. You should have experience working with the full stack of a web application. You are excited about and understand front end and robust app server architecture, and scalable backend design.
Bonus points for experience scaling an application to handle an increasing user base or having the ambition to put your scaling ideas into practice. Familiarity with our current tools is a plus, but it's much more important that you be a fast learner who can pick up new technologies quickly.
What will you build?
Academia’s mission is to make every academic paper published available for free.
Academia's platform has scaled to over 72M registered users, and over 8M monthly active users. You'll be designing and building systems and services to make our user base more productive in their academic work life. You'll be working on such systems as:
* communications and messaging tools to facilitate collaboration and feedback
* an engaging and scalable peer review system to facilitate the identification & wide-scale distribution of high quality academic research
* A scalable newsfeed, highlighting the latest research in every field
* tools and platforms that enable academics to publish directly on the Academia social network
* advanced search products and personalized analytics
What impact will you have?
Your work will impact millions of scholars, making knowledge more accessible and fostering discussion among scholars.
What will you get?
In addition to finding great talent for our tight-knit team, we value fostering employee growth. Our 41-person team values curiosity, initiative, teamwork, and we are passionate about building great products. We have an employee-focused benefits program that includes top notch health, dental, and vision insurance, a generous time off policy (21-days paid vacation, 11 federal holidays, and unlimited sick days), stock options, catered lunch, a stocked kitchen, and a book stipend. We’re located near MUNI & BART in beautiful downtown San Francisco.
What to expect from the Interview
At Academia, we believe in strong computer science fundamentals. If you're unfamiliar with parts of our stack, that's not a problem as long as you're hungry to learn. We're more interested in your abilities as a software engineer. You will be given the opportunity to meet most of the engineers on our team, plus the CTO and the CEO. Conversations will range from personal interests, to your resume background. We want to understand your problem-solving skills and your ability to write structured, scalable, production level code. During the interview process, you'll be given a logic problem and you'll be asked to write code to solve the problem. We view this as a discussion, and we're more interested in the way you think rather than that you got the right answer.
The Academia Story
Academia’s mission is to make every academic paper ever published available for free online.
Our site accelerates research and supports critical breakthroughs in all areas of research by allowing academics to publish and share their own work. Not only do these academics share their own research, they can use our platform to monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow.
Over 72 million academics are Academia.edu members (increasing at 55,000 per day), and have added 34 million papers. Academia.edu attracts over 30 million unique visitors a month, and has attracted investment of more than $34 million from leading VC firms including Khosla Ventures, True Ventures, Spark Capital and Tencent. Our work has garnered favorable attention from trade and mainstream media including Fortune, Wired, EdTech, Venture Beat, San Francisco Business Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, TechCrunch, Scientific American and Forbes.
Academia is turning cash flow positive and revenue growth is rapid. We have 41 employees at our San Francisco Office, with 24 in engineering.
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.
Technologies we use
- Ruby on Rails, React (to make our FE more responsive), RSpec and Jasmine for testing, PostgreSQL for data storage, Redis for in-memory data structures, Elasticsearch for our full-text search engine, Kafka for our publish-subscribe messaging, Neo4J for managing our email lists, all working with EC2 spot instances and autoscaling, and Ansible for configuration management.
Requirements
- Solid CS fundamentals; Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related major strongly preferred
- Recent college grads OR 2-5+ years of large scale web application development in a Unix/Linux environment
- Strong knowledge of web services architecture, and the ability to quickly learn new technologies
- Proficiency with Ruby, Python, or other scripting language is preferred but not required
- Understanding, creating and manipulating and querying databases
- API/back-end coding in one or more languages e.g. Ruby, Java, Python, etc.
- Front-end coding experience in one or more languages, e.g. HTML, JavaScript, Java, etc., is preferred but not required.
APPLY
SENIOR MOBILE ENGINEER - IOS
Senior Mobile Engineer - iOS
San Francisco
Academia is looking for a Senior Mobile Engineer to join our team.
Our ideal candidate is an engineer who can augment their mobile experience and expertise with a generalist outlook.
Good knowledge of iOS or Android development, deployment, and best-practices.
What will you build?
Academia’s mission is to make every academic paper published available for free.
Academia's platform has scaled to over 72M registered users (increasing at 55,000 per day). You'll be designing and building systems and services to make our user base more productive in their academic work life. Key features of Academia that you will work on are:
* a scalable mobile newsfeed, highlighting the latest research in every field
* mobile notifications for key events relating to an academic's work
* an engaging peer review system to facilitate the identification & wide-scale distribution of high quality academic research
* advanced search products
* impact metrics and personalized analytics
What impact will you have?
Your work will impact millions of academics and non-academics, making knowledge more accessible and accelerating the world's research.
What will you get?
In addition to finding great talent for our tight-knit team, we value fostering employee growth. Our 41-person team values curiosity, initiative, teamwork, and we are passionate about building great products. We have an employee-focused benefits program that includes top notch health, dental, and vision insurance, a generous time off policy (21-days paid vacation, 11 federal holidays, and unlimited sick days), stock options, catered lunch, a stocked kitchen, and a book stipend. We’re located near MUNI & BART in beautiful downtown San Francisco.
The Academia Story
Academia’s mission is to make every academic paper ever published available for free online.
Our site accelerates research and supports critical breakthroughs in all areas of research by allowing academics to publish and share their own work. Not only do these academics share their own research, they can use our platform to monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow.
Over 72 million academics are Academia.edu members, and have added 34 million papers. Academia.edu attracts over 30 million unique visitors a month, and has attracted investment of more than $34 million from leading VC firms including Khosla Ventures, True Ventures, Spark Capital and Tencent. Our work has garnered favorable attention from trade and mainstream media including Fortune, Wired, EdTech, Venture Beat, San Francisco Business Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, TechCrunch, Scientific American and Forbes.
Academia is turning cash flow positive and revenue growth is rapid. We have 41 employees at our San Francisco Office, with 26 in engineering.
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.
Technologies we use
We are building entirely new mobile apps for Academia, first for iOS then for Android. The codebase is brand new and done with Swift with a JSON REST API. When we start working on the Android version it will be made with Kotlin. It's worth noting the mobile engineers do learn some basic backend development to enable us to create database migrations and API endpoints essentially making us “mobile full-stack”.We are taking our time to get the architecture and design patterns right, it’s our intention to build a quality product, not take shortcuts to rush to market.
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.
Requirements
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related major strongly preferred.
- Hands-on experience building, deploying, and scaling mobile applications.
- 2-5+ years of software engineering experience.
- Strong knowledge of web services architecture, and the ability to quickly learn new technologies
APPLY
ASSOCIATE PRODUCT MANAGER
Associate Product Manager
San Francisco
Academia is looking for an Associate Product Manager to join our team!
What we're looking for
For this role, we are looking for a creative person with a background in academic research. The primary responsibility of the role will be to develop new features and products for Academia.edu.
We are looking for someone with a recently completed Masters, PhD, post-doc, or time in a tenure track job. The more experience of academic research, and the various aspects of it, the better: publishing, peer review, applying for grants, presenting at conferences etc.
We are looking for someone who enjoys thinking about creative ways of solving problems. Someone who looks at the world around them and thinks about how some part of the world could be better. E.g. "peer review works like this today, but what if it worked this other way?"
The most important parts of the role of an associate product manager are:
* understand our academic users and their needs. This is where the background in academic research is helpful.
* generate ideas for meeting those needs - leading idea generation sessions, and nurturing embryonic ideas. This is where enjoying thinking creatively is important.
* validate those ideas through user research, surveys, A/B tests, and other techniques.
Any track record in demonstrating creativity will be valuable. E.g. starting projects from the ground up, e.g. a website or a club; or talking/writing about how some feature of the world could be better. Feel free to submit anything that manifests a creative mindset, an ability to think about new and fun ideas.
Academia is a creative place, and many people start conversations like 'Here is a crazy idea, what do you think?' We like crazy ideas, and we are looking for other people who like ideas to join us.
Skills that are nice to have:
* agile process: collect product ideas, prioritize them, document requirements, and work with engineers to build them.
* data analysis: analyze user behavior (SQL is preferred)
What will you get?
In addition to finding great talent for our tight-knit team, we value fostering employee growth. Our 41-person team values curiosity, initiative, teamwork, and we are passionate about building great products. We have an employee-focused benefits program that includes top notch health, dental, and vision insurance, a commuter benefit, catered lunch, a stocked kitchen, a generous time off policy (21-days paid vacation + 11 paid holidays), a foosball table, musical instruments, a book stipend, stock options, and we’re located near MUNI & BART in beautiful downtown San Francisco.
The Academia Story
Academia’s mission is to make every academic paper ever published available for free online.
Our site accelerates research and supports critical breakthroughs in all areas of research by allowing academics to publish and share their own work. Not only do these academics share their own research, they can use our platform to monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow.
Over 72 million academics are Academia.edu members (increasing at 55,000 per day), and have added 34 million papers. Academia.edu attracts over 30 million unique visitors a month, and has attracted investment of more than $34 million from leading VC firms including Khosla Ventures, True Ventures, Spark Capital and Tencent. Our work has garnered favorable attention from trade and mainstream media including Fortune, Wired, EdTech, Venture Beat, San Francisco Business Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, TechCrunch, Scientific American and Forbes.
Academia is turning cash flow positive and revenue growth is rapid. We have 41 employees at our San Francisco Office, with 24 in engineering.
What impact will you have?
Your work will impact millions of scholars, making knowledge more accessible and fostering discussion among scholars.
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.
Requirements
- An Associate Product Manager is expected to have recently completed advanced academic research - a Masters, a PhD, a Post-doc, or time in a tenure track job. The more experience of academic research, the better.
- Experience publishing papers, and peer reviewing them.
- Experience attending academic conferences, and ideally presenting at one or two of them
- Experience applying for grants, fellowships, jobs
- A love of thinking of ideas for improving things. Any history of identifying a problem, and identifying a solution to that problem, is great.
Please submit a CV and a covering letter. In your covering letter, or separate from your covering letter, please include some details of your experience thinking creatively about problems: problems you have encountered in your life, or problems in the world at large. Please interpret that broadly. Creativity comes in many forms. Ultimately we are looking for hints that if you come and join Academia, you will be able to turn your creative capacities to Academia.edu: to dreaming up fun and inventive new product ideas for the website.
If you want, but this is not necessary, you can include some thoughts about features, either big or small, that you would add to Academia.edu.
APPLY
SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER
Senior Product Manager
San Francisco
Academia is looking for a Senior Product Manager to join our team!
What we're looking for
The product manager's role is to understand what academics need, and coordinate the engineering development of products that solve them.
We are looking for a creative product manager to join our team at Academia. The most important skills of this role will be to:
- understand our users and their needs
- come up with ideas for meeting those needs
- validate those ideas through user research, surveys, A/B tests, and other techniques.
We are looking for someone who has 2+ years of product management experience, and a track record of creativity. Academia is a creative place, and many people start conversations like 'Here is a crazy idea, what do you think?' It's important to be able to think through your ideas and assess them fairly and unemotionally. You must develop and execute a rigorous system for figuring out 'does this idea have legs?' We have 42 employees at our San Francisco Office, with 26 in engineering.
Skills that are nice to have:
* Agile process: collect product ideas, prioritize them, document requirements, and work with engineers to build them.
* Funnel Optimization
* Growth
* Registration Path Conversion
* Free to Premium conversion
* Monetization
* Data analysis: analyze user behavior (SQL strongly preferred)
What will you design and build?
You'll be designing and building systems and services to enable academics to accelerate their research and careers. You'll be working on such systems as:
* mobile apps, which enable easier discovery and reading of academic papers
* a scalable news feed, highlighting the latest research in every field
* a scalable peer review system to facilitate the wide-scale verification of academic research
* tools that enable academics to publish directly on the Academia social network
What will you get?
In addition to finding great talent for our tight-knit team, we value fostering employee growth. Our 36-person team values curiosity, initiative, teamwork, and we are passionate about building great products. We have an employee-focused benefits program that includes top notch health, dental, and vision insurance, a commuter benefit, catered lunch, a stocked kitchen, a generous time off policy (21-days paid vacation + 11 paid holidays), a foosball table, musical instruments, a book stipend, stock options, and we’re located near MUNI & BART in beautiful downtown San Francisco.
Tools we use
Periscope and Postico for SQL analysis, Invision and WebFlow for prototyping, Balsamiq for mockups, Asana for ticket management, Github for bug tracking and code management.
The Academia Story
Academia’s mission is to make every academic paper ever published available for free online.
Our site accelerates research and supports critical breakthroughs in all areas of research by allowing academics to publish and share their own work. Not only do these academics share their own research, they can use our platform to monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow.
Over 72 million academics are Academia.edu members, and have added 34 million papers. Academia.edu attracts over 30 million unique visitors a month, and has attracted investment of more than $34 million from leading VC firms including Khosla Ventures, True Ventures, Spark Capital and Tencent. Our work has garnered favorable attention from trade and mainstream media including Fortune, Wired, EdTech, Venture Beat, San Francisco Business Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, TechCrunch, Scientific American and Forbes.
Academia is turning cash flow positive and revenue growth is rapid. We have 42 employees at our San Francisco Office, with 26 in engineering.
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.
What impact will you have?
Your work will impact millions of scholars, making knowledge more accessible and fostering discussion among scholars.
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.
Requirements
- A Senior Product Manager is expected to have 2+ years experience in a Product Management role
- Bachelor's Degree and 4+ years professional experience in tech, or Master's Degree and 2+ years experience.
- Past experience gathering user insights: survey development, user interview facilitation, etc.
- Strong analytical skills. Proficiency in SQL strongly preferred.
- Strong technical foundation, including experience working with engineers and documenting product requirements
- Agile product development experience, including backlog management
APPLY