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 125 million registered users, Academia is rapidly transforming the way researchers share their work. We're a small team of 53 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.
Benefits & Perks
Open Positions
Engineering
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 100M registered users, and over 70M monthly unique visitors, 19M+ 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 >46-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 is building a new distribution and peer review platform for the world's academic research. Guided by a mission to accelerate the world’s research, Academia aims to make every academic paper ever published available for free online and accessible by anyone in the world.
Academia has built a network of Academics around the world who access our platform on the web and a native mobile app to discover new research, collaborate, recommend and peer review papers, and gather feedback on draft research by participating in real-time collaborative sessions. Academia’s platform has registered more than 100 million users (growing at over 150,000 per day), has over 70 million unique visitors every month, including over 19M logged-in monthly active users (MAU). We have over 150,000 paying premium subscribers, which has contributed to a doubling in revenue for both of the last two years.
Academia has attracted $34 million in investment 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 UK Times, Fortune, Wired, EdTech, Venture Beat, San Francisco Business Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, TechCrunch, Scientific American, and Forbes.
Academia is a proud equal opportunity employer and we are committed to hiring and supporting a diverse workforce. 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.
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SENIOR FRONT END ENGINEER
Senior Front End Engineer
San Francisco
Academia is seeking an experienced Senior Front-End Engineer who is excited to use their deep understanding of web technologies to improve the academia.edu website. In this role, you'll use your mastery of Javascript, HTML and CSS to lead engineering efforts that focus on usability, re-usability, performance and accessibility. You'll work with a cross-functional team to launch new features and campaigns.
Requirements
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science preferred but not required. 3+ years of experience
• Preferred 4-5+ years
• Deep knowledge of web front-end technologies required
• Experience architecting reusable front-end components
• Experience in gradual migrations to new frameworks
• Experience teaching rest of company, setting direction, communicating direction of front-end infrastructure to rest of team/company
• React and Redux experience is a plus but not required
About Academia
Academia is building a new Open Science distribution and peer review platform for Academic papers. Guided by a mission to accelerate the world’s research, Academia aims to make every academic paper ever published available for free online and accessible by anyone in the world. Academia has become the world's leading software platform for reading academic papers.
Academia has built a network of Academics around the world who access our platform on the web and a native mobile app to discover new research, collaborate, recommend and peer review papers, and gather feedback on draft research by participating in real-time collaborative sessions. Academia’s platform has registered more than 100 million users (growing at over 150,000 per day), and has over 70 million unique visitors every month, including over 20M logged-in monthly active users (MAU). We have over 150,000 paying premium subscribers, which has contributed to a doubling in revenue for both o f the last two years.
Academia has attracted $34 million in investment 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 UK Times, Fortune, Wired, EdTech, Venture Beat, San Francisco Business Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, TechCrunch, Scientific American, and Forbes.
Academia is a proud equal opportunity employer and we are committed to hiring and supporting a diverse workforce. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.
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SENIOR MOBILE ENGINEER - ANDROID
Senior Mobile Engineer - Android
San Francisco
The Academia Story
Academia is building a new Open Science distribution and peer review platform for the world’s Academic papers. Guided by a mission to accelerate the world’s research, Academia aims to make every academic paper ever published available for free online and accessible by anyone in the world. Academia has become the world's leading software platform for reading academic papers.
Academia has built a network of Academics around the world who access our platform on the web and a native mobile app to discover new research, collaborate, recommend and peer review papers, and gather feedback on draft research by participating in real-time collaborative sessions. Academia’s platform has registered more than 100 million users (growing on average at over 150,000 per day), and has over 70 million unique visitors every month, including over 20M logged-in monthly active users (MAU). We have over 150,000 paying premium subscribers, which has contributed to a doubling in revenue for both of the last two years.
Academia is looking for a Senior Mobile Engineer - Android 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 Android development, deployment, and best-practices.
We are building entirely new mobile apps for Academia. Our iOS app just launched and we are about to start working on Android with Kotlin. The Android codebase will be brand new leveraging our JSON REST API. It's worth noting our 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.
What will you build?
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 tens of 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 42-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.
Requirements
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related major strongly preferred.
• Solid Computer Science fundamentals and their application
• 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.
Academia has attracted $34 million in investment 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 UK Times, Fortune, Wired, EdTech, Venture Beat, San Francisco Business Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, TechCrunch, Scientific American, and Forbes.
Academia is a proud equal opportunity employer and we are committed to hiring and supporting a diverse workforce. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.
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SENIOR MOBILE ENGINEER - IOS
Senior Mobile Engineer - iOS
San Francisco
Senior Mobile Engineer – iOS,
SAN FRANCISCO, CA
Our ideal candidate is an engineer that is a solid software engineering generalist that is experienced and knowledgeable in iOS development, deployment, and best-practices.
What will you build?
Academia’s mission is to make every academic research paper published available on any platform, anywhere, anytime for free.
You will design and build systems and services with Swift to make our user base more productive on their iOS mobile devices in their academic work life. This will include:
* a scalable mobile newsfeed, highlighting the latest research in every field that will be customizable by user preferences.
* 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
You will be part of a small “world class” team that will build new products and features from scratch! Your work will have a positive social impact on many millions of academics and non-academics alike by making all academic knowledge more accessible in much shorter time frames and accelerating the world's research.
Position Requirements
· Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related major strongly preferred.
· Hands-on experience building, deploying, and scaling native iOS applications.
· 2-5+ years of software engineering experience.
· Strong knowledge Computer Science fundamentals and web services architecture
· The ability to quickly learn new technologies and apply them successfully.
Technologies we use
We are building entirely new iOS mobile apps for Academia. The codebase is brand new and done with Swift with a JSON REST API. Our mobile engineers will learn some basic backend development to enable them 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 in lieu of taking shortcuts to rush to market.
What’s in it for you?
You will join a team of equally talented, fun, smart, collaborative people in building new products and from scratch and new features on existing products. You will be a part of a positive, supportive work/life balance culture that fosters your professional growth. You will enjoy an employee-focused benefits program that includes 100% employer paid premiums on health, dental, and vision insurance, a generous time off policy (21-days paid vacation, 11 federal holidays, and unlimited sick days), stock options, a daily catered lunch, a fully stocked kitchen, and a book stipend. We’re conveniently located a few blocks from MUNI & BART stations in beautiful downtown San Francisco office close to world class restaurants and other venues.
About us…
Academia.edu is building a new distribution and peer review platform for academic research. Guided by a mission to accelerate the world’s research, Academia aims to make every academic paper ever published available for free online and accessible by anyone in the world.
Academia has built a network of Academics around the world who access our platform on the web and via native mobile apps to discover new research, collaborate, recommend and peer review papers, and gather feedback on draft research by participating in real-time collaborative sessions.
Academia’s platform has more than 110 million registered users (growing at over 150,000 per day), has over 70 million unique visitors every month. We have over 150,000 paying premium subscribers, which has contributed to us doubling in revenue for both of the last two years.
Academia has attracted $34 million in investment 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 UK Times, Fortune, Wired, EdTech, Venture Beat, San Francisco Business Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, TechCrunch, Scientific American, and Forbes.
Academia is a proud equal opportunity employer and we are committed to hiring and supporting a diverse workforce. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.
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Design
GROWTH DESIGNER
Growth Designer
San Francisco
Academia.edu is hiring a Growth Designer
Despite several companies laying off workers due to the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic, Academia.edu is profitable and growing. We have a goal of making a bigger impact on the world, and we’re looking for a remarkable Growth Designer to help achieve this mission.
What you’ll do
You’ll work closely with PMs, Engineers, User Researchers, and C-level Executives to design for user and business impact. More specifically, you will:
* Design for user and business impact. You’ll create user experiences that drive business growth.
* Work in a range of areas. You’ll work on projects ranging from customer acquisition to product marketing and growth.
* Tell stories. Academia is a product that can be simple or complex. It can also be used for many things. You’ll create materials that help people understand the product and its value for them.
* Wear many hats and broaden your skills. On some days you will be designing marketing funnels and producing design assets for your team and other designers. On other days, you will be white boarding high-level conceptual solutions to UX problems.
* Prototype and usability test. You’ll prototype designs with the software of your choice and then usability test them with users.
* Launch experiments and iterate on your designs: You’ll launch multiple A/B tests and measure their performance. You’ll then iterate and discover new ways to increase impact and conversion.
* Be an active member of the Design Team. You’ll give and solicit feedback from other designers in order to continually raise our bar for quality.
Desired experience:
* 3-5 years of hands-on experience in online marketing design. (Eg: Designing emails, landing pages, modals, banner ads, marketing funnels, images, illustrations, or icons).
* Expert visual and marketing design skills.
* A portfolio (online or PDF) that demonstrates your experience, success, and creativity in your projects.
* Degree in Graphic Design or equivalent.
Nice to have:
* Experience leading marketing design for a team or small company.
* Experience in a test-driven environment (A/B testing and results analysis).
* Experience in producing designs that improve conversion rates, marketing experiences, and funnels.
* Expertise in producing visual designs to support various teams.
* Experience leading discussions with PMs, engineering, other designers, and execs in evolving design proposals.
* Expertise in considering the technical difficulty of different designs, and in finding ways to test concepts as simply as possible.
* Expertise in communicating the value of our product offerings in a way that consumers want to pay for them.
* Expertise at developing multiple alternative designs with distinct theses, allowing the Academia team to determine what works best.
* Expertise incorporating many different viewpoints into your design decisions.
* Experience with subscription products.
About Academia.edu
Academia.edu is a mission-driven company with the focus of accelerating the world's research. Our core offering is an extensive repository of research papers covering thousands of topics - all accessible for free.
We fund this core offering with a successful suite of premium services that helps academics track their impact and make their research more efficient.
We’re proud to share that over 125 million academics and researchers from all over the world have signed up and benefited from our platform (with over 20M monthly active daily users). The outcome of our work has been an increased velocity of scientific achievement in every field, resulting in a positive social impact on humanity.
Life is short - do something that matters!
Join a company where what you work on changes the world for the better. As a Growth Designer on the Growth and Marketing Team, you will play the important role of leading the marketing and growth design of our premium products. The success of our premium products are critical to funding our free offering.
Benefits & perks
* Compensation & Benefits: Competitive salary, stock options, Flexible Spending Account (FSA) & DCA, & a 401k.
* Health & Self-Care: Paid medical, dental, & vision insurance for employees & their dependents. Flexible sick days, flexible hours, four weeks paid vacation, and paid parental leave. Standing desks.
* Convenience & Location: Catered lunches served daily, snacks & drinks. On-site showers & bike storage. The office is located just a short walk to public transportation.
* Learning & Development: Budget for professional development, team building, and events. Free books.
* Fun & Activities: Chess, foosball, piano, guitar, board games, juggling. Company retreat every summer. Weekly bootcamp with our personal trainer.
* Paid Sabbatical: Six weeks of fully-paid sabbatical leave for every four years you work here.
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Infrastructure
SR. SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEER (SRE)
Sr. Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
San Francisco
Senior SRE / Site Reliability Engineer
SAN FRANCISCO, CA
Academia is building a new Open Science distribution and peer review platform for the world’s Academic papers. Guided by a mission to accelerate the world’s research, Academia aims to make every academic paper ever published available for free online and accessible by anyone in the world. Academia has become the world's leading software platform for reading academic papers.
Academia has built a network of Academics around the world who access our platform on the web and a native mobile app to discover new research, collaborate, recommend and peer review papers, and gather feedback on draft research by participating in real-time collaborative sessions. Academia’s platform has registered more than 100 million users (growing on average at over 150,000 per day), and has over 70 million unique visitors every month, including over 20M logged-in monthly active users (MAU). We have over 150,000 paying premium subscribers, which has contributed to a doubling in revenue for both of the last two years.
Academia is hiring a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to join our team.
At Academia, we believe SRE is a mindset and a set of engineering approaches to running better production systems - we build our own creative engineering solutions to reliability problems. SREs are responsible for the big picture of how our systems are designed for operability, how they relate to each other, and we use a breadth of tools and approaches to solve a broad spectrum of problems.
Requirements:
• 3+ years of experience minimum as an SRE on large scale high profile apps.
• 8+ years of overall software engineering experience.
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science is preferred or equivalent work experience.
• Strong technical communications skills and solid knowledge of web architecture and systems.
• Strong analytical and problem solving skills.
• Fluent coding skills
• Deep knowledge of Linux systems experience
• Current and deep knowledge of Cloud Infrastructure technologies
• Current and deep experience with Site Reliability Engineering principles
• Lots of war stories about “saving the day”.
• Demonstrated ability to "fix a plane while it's in flight".
• We use Terraform and Ansible for provisioning, Sensu and Librato for monitoring, PagerDuty, AWS, EC2. You should have experience with these or similar tools.
• Experience maintaining and automating high availability systems (ideally for millions of users)
• Experience wearing a pager and resolving “firefights”.
• Leadership experience is preferred. Since this role has the potential to grow into managing multiple infrastructure teams; we'd like to find an engineer who might find this interesting, but it's not a requirement if you don't.
About Academia
Academia has attracted $34 million in investment 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 UK Times, Fortune, Wired, EdTech, Venture Beat, San Francisco Business Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, TechCrunch, Scientific American, and Forbes.
Academia is a proud equal opportunity employer and we are committed to hiring and supporting a diverse workforce. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.
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