We're Hiring

We’re Academia.edu, and our mission is to accelerate the world’s research. Academia’s goal is to make every academic paper ever published free, available online, and accessible by anyone in the world. We’re a small team just over 55 and you’ll be working closely with our customer success team of 2. 

Academics, professionals and researchers around the world access our platform both on the web and our 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 139 million users (growing at over 100,000 per day), has over 60 million unique visitors every month, including over 10M logged-in monthly active users (MAU). We have over 280,000 paying premium subscribers, which has contributed to a doubling in revenue for both of the last two years.

We’re looking for a thoughtful, conscientious, detail oriented person to help us expand our customer success department. In this role, you’ll be interacting regularly with our users through email and helping them solve their problems as well as making suggestions in improving the overall user experience on Academia. In summary, you should love to help solve problems, be able to complete tasks without close supervision, have great attention to detail, and have strong communication skills including excellent spelling and grammar. 

This is a part-time role which could potentially grow to full time for the right person. This position is currently remote due to COVID-19, though we may all be working from our San Francisco office sometime after February 2021.

* Communicate with customers to identify their problems and find solutions in a helpful and thoughtful manner.

* Identify, monitor and resolve potential problematic customer issues and provide reports on these matters.

* Solve a range of straightforward problems and come up with possible solutions for the cause rather than fixing the effect.

* Surface common customer issues and help refine processes within the customer success team. 

Recommend changes in overall Academia process and procedures based on customer feedback.

* Have demonstrated customer service skills - always willing to help a user in trouble!

* Can work independently and are self-motivated to complete tasks.

* Must be conscientious and kind (even for challenging customers).

* Reliable & dependable.

* Looking for ways to improve the customer experience.

* A problem-solver at heart - when possible, looks for answers on their own before asking for help.

Qualifications: 

* GED or high school diploma required, associates or bachelor’s preferred.

* Fluent in reading and writing English.

* Incredible spelling and grammar. 

* Basic knowledge of technical/computer concepts, such as web browsers, page links and URLs, IP addresses, and browser cookies.

* Proficient computer user. 

* Experience in academia, with the Academia platform, or with educational technology

* Experience with Zendesk.

* Experience moderating user generated content (UGC).

* Previous email customer service experience.

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.

The Role 

Academia is searching for a Director of Infrastructure Engineering with extensive experience working on Site Reliability and Product Engineering teams in highly available, large-scale production environments.

In this role, you will be leading a team of Site Reliability Engineers who keep our production core infrastructure systems online, scalable, and out ahead of the business services that depend on them. You'll be responsible for developing an infrastructure services roadmap and leading your team through the execution of continuous service improvement initiatives.

In your role as Director of Infrastructure Engineering, you will:

• Report to the CTO.

• Strategically drive our evolving Operations production design and service architecture, developing reliable and scalable infrastructure with proper monitoring, alerting, documentation, and capacity planning.

• Manage the 24x7 infrastructure that powers Academia's production services.

• Develop the SRE team through training and mentorship.

• Manage the team's service coverage strategies and on-call rotations.

• Manage a team of Site Reliability Engineers supporting our production infrastructure and the many mission-critical business services that depend on it.

• Work with other technical leaders to define and implement process and technical standards that improve performance, stability, and standardization across environments.

• Understand large-scale/distributed product architectures and the production ecosystem in which they live in order to develop capacity plans, SLA metrics and standards, plan product launches and releases, and solve operability challenges.

• Own the uptime, reliability, scalability, resiliency, recoverability, and security of our Core Infrastructure.

• Own the shared compute and storage infrastructure, what we use, where we use it, how much it costs, and how we can constantly improve it.

• Create comprehensive and strategic plans to solve technical, process, and staffing challenges. Relentlessly drive those plans forward to achieve business success.

• Develop the technical and soft skills of your team members through projects and goal setting.

• Participate as part of the broader Operations leadership team to develop the organizations skills as a whole.

• Work closely with our operations and recruiting staff to expand and strengthen the team, including sourcing and interviewing candidates, participating in conferences/events, and on-boarding new hires.

• 8+ years of direct management of technical staff in a large-scale Unix-based production environment

• 5+ years of hands-on experience as a member of a technical team responsible for a production environment

• Exceptional verbal and written communication skills and executive presence.

• Hands-on experience managing a large distributed computing environment and associated configuration management solutions (e.g. Puppet, Nagios, Chef, Juju, etc.).

• Extensive knowledge of Public and Private Cloud infrastructure and modern virtualization technologies (e.g. AWS, GCP, VMware, OpenStack, etc.).

• Experience with industry-standard best practices sin site reliability, change management, incident management.

• Previous responsibility for hiring and performance management decisions, including managing super stars and under-performers.

• Solid understanding of developer tools and concepts like Agile, continuous integration, version control, test-driven deployment

• BS or MIS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent experience

If you like wild growth and working with happy, enthusiastic over-achievers, you'll enjoy your career with us!

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 139 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 280,000 paying premium subscribers, which has contributed to a doubling in revenue for both of the last two years. Despite Covid-19, we are profitable and still growing.

Before Covid-19 we had these cool activities, but now we’re all sheltering in place many of these activities are still done remotely and we have others in the works.

* Fun & Activities: Chess, foosball, piano, guitar, board games, juggling. Company retreat every summer. Weekly bootcamp with our personal trainer.

Before Covid-19 we had these cool activities, but now we’re all sheltering in place many of these activities are still done remotely and we have others in the works.

Academia is looking for a Full-Stack Software Engineer to join our team!

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.

Academia’s mission is to make every academic paper published available for free.

* 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

Your work will impact millions of scholars, making knowledge more accessible and fostering discussion among scholars.

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.

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.

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 139 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 280,000 paying premium subscribers, which has contributed to a doubling in revenue for both of the last two years.

Academia has attracted $38 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.

 

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.

 

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.

·        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.

 

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.

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.

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.

 

 

Academia.edu is looking for someone to create and lead the Product Marketing function at Academia. You will help our team grow the number of retained new users to our academic research platform, and new subscriptions to our Premium suite. You would be Academia's first Marketing hire.

This position reports to Academia's Chief Operating Officer, who leads the PM, Design, Research, and User Operations teams.

 

We are profitable and growing, despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our Mission is to accelerate the world's research, and it has never been more relevant.

 

Academia hosts a repository of 20+ million free academic papers, allowing anyone in the world to read scientific and scholarly research papers. The platform enables faculty, students, and private sector researchers to discover the latest research and leading academics in their fields of interest. We are proud of our 139+ million registered users, growing by 3-4 million every month. 

 

We have a "Freemium" business model, providing free access to research for everyone and paid premium capabilities to subscribers. Subscribing to Academia Premium gives researchers access to advanced research discovery tools like Summaries, Bulk Download, and Advanced Search. Subscribing academics also receive enhanced analytics like Mentions and Readers, and career building tools like Grants and Websites. Our 280,000+ premium subscribers cover the cost of hosting free research and pursuing our Mission.

 

We are a small team of ~55 employees with ~30 engineers. We are hiring across multiple roles, with plans to launch several new products this year while growing the platform profitably.

 

We are looking for a creative and energetic product marketer who:

* has 5+ years’ experience marketing consumer software products

* can operate initially as an expert individual contributor, then hire, lead, and mentor a team

* can understand academic authors and researchers and their needs, and has experience building marketing plans serving different user segments

* demonstrates a track record of working with Product Managers, Designers, and Engineers to develop feasible and consistent solutions to help users better understand the value propositions of our products

* can build and execute promotional plans and communication strategies, including positioning, messaging, pricing, and channel strategy

* has strong analytical and business modeling skills, with the ability to set, analyze, and report on key metrics

* possesses the ability to quickly assess new ideas unemotionally in a rigorous prioritization framework

* demonstrates the ability to create clear, concise, and compelling copy and creative to convince our key customers to convert

* is a self-starter who can work in an environment with limited oversight but where constant collaboration and communication is a must

 

* Experience working on consumer subscription services

* Experience working in freemium, content aggregation, EdTech, or social networking contexts

* Experience building business cases to support strategic recommendations

* Email marketing experience

 

* Compensation & Benefits: Competitive salary, stock options, Flexible Spending Account (FSA) & Dependent Care Account (DCA), and a 401k.

* Health & Self-Care: Paid medical, dental, & vision insurance for employees & their dependents. Flexible sick days, flexible hours, four weeks + 1 day (21 days) paid vacation, 11 holiday days, and paid parental leave. Standing desks.

* Convenience & Location: All Academia employees may work remotely through at least January 2021. As soon as San Francisco rules permit and we can safely re-open the office, employees may optionally work there. We cater lunch in the office every day, with a huge selection of free snacks & drinks. On-site showers & bike storage, and located a short walk to Montgomery Station public transport.

* Learning & Development: Budget for professional development, team building, and events. Free books.

* Fun & Activities: Before Covid-19 shelter-in-place, we had an active work “life” at Academia.  But now, we're all sheltering in place. Many of these activities are remote now. We have regular “lunch and learn” Zoom classes, an active “movie night”, chess, weekly piano recitals, and interactive video games.

* Paid Sabbatical: Six weeks of fully-paid sabbatical leave for every four years you work here.

 

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. 

Note: Academia is working with an external recruiting firm for this role; your application may be shared with them. A recruiter representing Academia may contact you regarding your application.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before Covid-19 we had these cool activities, but now we’re all sheltering in place many of these activities are still done remotely and we have others in the works.

Our business model is a premium subscription service. The success of our premium subscription products is critical to funding our mission to accelerate the world's research.  We have over 250,000 premium subscribers; despite Covid-19, we are profitable and growing.

You’ll work closely with PMs, Engineers, User Researchers, and C-level Executives. You will be a full-stack "embedded" designer working closely with a dedicated PM, engineering lead, and ~5 engineers.

* Experience building new consumer product offerings, and conducting user research to inform MVP definition and development.

Before Covid-19 we had these cool activities, but now we’re all sheltering in place many of these activities are still done remotely and we have others in the works.

 

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. 

Academia.edu is looking for creative and mission driven Product Manager to join our team. If you are a person who likes to start conversations like "Here's a crazy idea, what do you think?", and can follow-up your best ideas with a plan to build and test them, then you may be the right person to join our team. You would be the 5th member of Academia's PM team.

This position reports to Academia's Chief Operating Officer, who leads the PM, Design, Research, and User Operations teams.

We are profitable and growing, despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our Mission is to accelerate the world's research, and it has never been more relevant.

 

Academia hosts a repository of 20+ million free academic papers, allowing anyone in the world to read scientific and scholarly research papers. The platform enables faculty, students, and private sector researchers to discover the latest research and leading academics in their fields of interest. We are proud of our 130+ million registered users, growing by 3-4 million every month. 

 

We have a "Freemium" business model, providing free access to research for everyone and paid premium capabilities to subscribers. Subscribing to Academia Premium gives researchers access to advanced research discovery tools like Summaries, Bulk Download, and Advanced Search. Subscribing academics also receive enhanced analytics like Mentions and Readers, and career building tools like Grants and Websites. Our 250,000+ premium subscribers cover the cost of hosting free research and pursuing our Mission.

 

We are a small team of ~55 employees with ~30 engineers. We are hiring across multiple roles, with plans to launch several new products this year while growing the platform profitably.

We are looking for a product manager who:

* has 2+ years of product management experience in a B2C consumer software business;

* deeply understands user needs to develop new product experiences to solve their problems;

* has a track record of identifying, developing, and launching products that achieve meaningful business results;

* can demonstrate creativity in product problem solving and MVP design;

* has experience with A/B testing, product metrics, and quantitative analysis;

* possesses the ability to quickly assess new ideas unemotionally, and build a business case to evaluate them.

* Experience understanding or serving the needs of academics, researchers, or undergraduate students;

* Experience with the Growth thinking (many of our PMs have taken the Reforge Growth Series);

* Experience with developing products within a freemium subscription business.

* a recommendation engine helping researchers discover the best related content to read next;

* new tools for discovering and evaluating new research;

* new iOS and Android apps that enable researchers to keep up to date during the interstitial moments of their day.

Sisense (Periscope) for SQL analysis, Invision and WebFlow for prototyping, Asana for ticket management, Github for bug tracking and code management. 

* Compensation & Benefits: Competitive salary, stock options, Competitive salary, stock options, Flexible Spending Account (FSA) & Dependent Care Account (DCA), and a 401k.

* Health & Self-Care: Paid medical, dental, & vision insurance for employees & their dependents. Flexible sick days, flexible hours, four weeks + 1 day (21 days) paid vacation, 11 holiday days, and paid parental leave. Standing desks.

* Convenience & Location: All Academia employees may work remotely through at least January 2021. As soon as San Francisco rules permit and we can safely re-open the office, employees may optionally work there. We cater lunch in the office every day, with a huge selection of free snacks & drinks. On-site showers & bike storage, and located a short walk to Montgomery Station public transport.

* Learning & Development: Budget for professional development, team building, and events. Free books.

* Fun & Activities: Before Covid-19 shelter-in-place, we had an active work “life” at Academia.  But now, we're all sheltering in place. Many of these activities are remote now. We have regular “lunch and learn” Zoom classes, an active “movie night”, chess, weekly piano recitals, and interactive video games.

* Paid Sabbatical: Six weeks of fully-paid sabbatical leave for every four years you work here.

 

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.