Academia (www.academia.edu) – Generalists and UI Engineers.
Full Time in San Francisco (near the Montgomery Bart Station)
We are part of the Open Science movement. Our agile team of 12 Engineers are building a disruptive platform that will allow researchers to share their work more quickly, obtain greater peer-review coverage, and innovate faster. We are building this platform using Rails, Coffeescript, Backbone, PostgreSQL, and hosting it on AWS.
Our interview process is very straight forward: apply to hiring@academia.edu and Ashley John will respond to your email within 48 hours. We are seeking developers who love to code, who want to use their technical skills to make a huge difference, work in a fast paced startup, and enjoy solving complex technical challenges. We offer amazing perks including an unlimited book budget. We devour books!
Full Time Generalists and Front End Engineers | Downtown San Francisco (near the Montgomery BART Station)
We have a very agile group of 12 engineers at Academia.edu in Downtown SF. I joined them because I really respect the problems that they are working on. Are you aware of how inefficient, inaccurate, slow and costly, scientific publishing is? In fact, the vast majority of peer-reviewed scientific research that gets published is actually not reproducible. Imagine a world where scientists can share their research more quickly, obtain greater peer-review coverage, and innovate faster. I joined because I wanted to contribute to building this disruptive Open Science platform.
Below you can find some more info about the company and the general mission of Open Science below if you're interested in the subject.
The tech stack here consists of Rails, Coffeescript, Backbone, PostgreSQL, hosted on AWS. I'd like to tell you more about our team so ping me at ashley@academia.edu so we can set up a quick call.
Ashley J.
More about the company:
According to EdTech Magazine we are tech underdogs who are “key disruptors among open-access publishers.”
We have 15MM users who support our mission and we are growing 10% per month. We are financially backed with $17MM by top VCs including Khosla Ventures, True Ventures and Spark Capital.
We're building an Open Science platform to bring the world's research online and available to all for free. We’re seeking intuitive Product Designers who can see beyond our current execution. Product Design will be instrumental in shaping the future of our product and company.
You’ll work directly with the CEO and VP of Product to create features from concept to execution. You’ll also with our talented team of 12 Engineers to build features for our community of 15,831,966 researchers.
Your Role as a Product Designer
-Conceptualize & define product strategies with our CEO & VP of Product
-Shape our Product Development process by developing and maintaining visual and experience design standards
-Elevate the existing product by creating interaction flows, beautiful interfaces, and our UI Kit
-Work on an exciting private beta feature that is changing the way academics discuss research
-Receive & provide design criticism
-Qualitatively and quantitatively test features with our Engineering team
You Should Have
-An online portfolio that illustrates your professional experience designing web applications
-Visual & experience design expertise
-A mastery of UI design tools such as Photoshop or Sketch
-The ability to apply your knowledge to solving extremely difficult UI challenges for millions of users
-A desire to take advantage of our unlimited budget for professional development by constantly learning and growing
It’d be Awesome to Have
-Front-end development experience. HTML & CSS would be great for prototyping. JavaScript experience would be amazing. -
-Back-end experience would drop our jaws.
-Management or hiring experience. You’ll be one of our first designers so being able to grow and lead a team would make you the ultimate unicorn.
-Mobile design experience.
How to Apply
Email your Dribbble profile or portfolio along with your LinkedIn profile or resume to product@academia.edu
Full Time Engineers | Downtown San Francisco (near the Montgomery BART Station)
We have a very agile group of 12 engineers at Academia.edu in Downtown SF. I joined them because I really respect the problems that they are working on. Are you aware of how inefficient, inaccurate, slow and costly, scientific publishing is? In fact, the vast majority of peer-reviewed scientific research that gets published is actually not reproducible. Imagine a world where scientists can share their research more quickly, obtain greater peer-review coverage, and innovate faster. I joined because I wanted to contribute to building this disruptive Open Science platform.
Below you can find some more info about the company and the general mission of Open Science below if you're interested in the subject.
The tech stack here consists of Rails, Coffeescript, Backbone, PostgreSQL, hosted on AWS. I'd like to tell you more about our team so ping me at ashley@academia.edu so we can set up a quick call.
Ashley J.
More about the company:
According to EdTech Magazine we are tech underdogs who are “key disruptors among open-access publishers.”
We have 15MM users who support our mission and we are growing 10% per month. We are financially backed with $17MM by top VCs including Khosla Ventures, True Ventures and Spark Capital.
Mission Driven Startup in Downtown SF near the Montgomery BART Station
Backed by Khosla Ventures
Hiring Full Time Engineers
We are a lean team of 13 Engineers on a huge mission to open science. We are building a better platform for researchers because the current publication system is too slow, inefficient and costly. We are doing this using Rails, Coffeescript, Backbone, and PostgreSQL, all hosted on AWS.
According to EdTech Magazine, we are tech underdogs who are “key disruptors among open-access publishers.”
We have 14MM users who support our mission and we are growing 10% per month. We are financially backed with $17MM by top VCs including Khosla Ventures, True Ventures and Spark Capital.
Email ashley@academia.edu so we can set up a time to chat this week.
* Our mission is to build a new system for scientists to share their results and broadcast their work
* We have over 13 million users and they are extremely important to us!
* Our investors include Khosla Ventures, Spark Capital and True Ventures
Team:
* We move quickly, everyone is in charge of their own projects but also very collaborative
* We get catered lunches from zerocater and lunch usually ends with a round of foosball
* We're a diverse group with backgrounds in philosophy, biology, music and art
Technical:
* Peer Review: We are revisiting peer review with a novel product built from the ground up that will allow layers of discussion on top of a single document and we are building this using Rails and Backbone.js
* Recommendation Engine: Lots of machine learning to parse science papers and figure out what people want to read. Pretty cool stuff
* Servers, Speed, Security and Storage (Postgres / Dynamo / Elasticsearch / Redis): Speed and stability are really important to us because areas in the world with slower internet connections tend to be where researchers can benefit the most from open access to research
About you:
- You want to have a huge impact on a product that is making a positive impact on the world
- You have a curious mind and enjoy tackling hard technical problems
- You work best when given a lot of autonomy
- You enjoy board games, foosball, rock climbing, sailing, roundtable discussions and/or free lunches
Please contact ashley@academia.edu if you would like to apply or if you have any questions.
We are also hosting a meetup this Friday, October 3rd. If you would like to join, please rsvp at http://www.meetup.com/academia/
* Our mission is to build a new system for scientists to share their results and broadcast their work
* We have over 12 million users and they are extremely important to us!
* Our investors include Khosla Ventures, Spark Capital and True Ventures
Team:
* We move quickly, everyone is in charge of their own projects but also very collaborative
* We get catered lunches from zerocater and lunch usually ends with a round of foosball
* We're a diverse group with backgrounds in philosophy, biology, music and art
Technical:
* Peer Review: We are revisiting peer review with a novel product built from the ground up that will allow layers of discussion on top of a single document and we are building this using Rails and Backbone.js
About you:
- You want to have a huge impact on a product that is making a positive impact on the world
- You have a curious mind and enjoy tackling hard technical problems
- You work best when given a lot of autonomy
- You enjoy board games, foosball, rock climbing, sailing, roundtable discussions and/or free lunches
Please contact ashley@academia.edu if you would like to apply or if you have any questions.
* Our mission is to build a new system for scientists to share their results and broadcast their work
* We have over 11 million users and they are extremely important to us!
* Our investors include Khosla Ventures, Spark Capital and True Ventures
Team:
* We move quickly, everyone is in charge of their own projects but also very collaborative
* We get catered lunches from zerocater and lunch usually ends with a round of foosball
* We're a diverse group with backgrounds in philosophy, biology, music and art
Technical:
* Peer Review: We are revisiting peer review with a novel product built from the ground up that will allow layers of discussion on top of a single document and we are building this using Rails and Backbone.js
* Recommendation Engine: Lots of machine learning to parse science papers and figure out what people want to read. Pretty cool stuff
* Servers, Speed, Security and Storage (Postgres / Dynamo / Elasticsearch / Redis): Speed and stability are really important to us because areas in the world with slower internet connections tend to be where researchers can benefit the most from open access to research
About you:
- You want to have a huge impact on a product that is making a positive impact on the world
- You have a curious mind and enjoy tackling hard technical problems
- You work best when given a lot of autonomy
- You enjoy board games, foosball, rock climbing, sailing, roundtable discussions and/or free lunches
Please contact ashley@academia.edu if you would like to apply or if you have any questions.
To apply just send us an email: ashley@academia.edu
Company:
* Our mission is to build a new system for scientists to share their results and broadcast their work
* We have over 10 million users and they are extremely important to us!
* Our investors include Khosla Ventures, Spark Capital and True Ventures
Team:
* We move quickly, everyone is in charge of their own projects but also very collaborative
* We get catered lunches from zerocater and lunch usually ends with a round of foosball
* We're a diverse group with backgrounds in philosophy, biology, music and art.
Technical:
* We are a Rails shop (you don't need to know Rails though, just how to tackle difficult technical challenges)
* Peer Review: We are revisiting peer review with a novel product built from the ground up that will allow layers of discussion on top of a single document and we are building this using Rails and Backbone
* Recommendation Engine: Lots of machine learning to parse science papers and figure out what people want to read. Pretty cool stuff.
* Servers, Speed, Security and Storage (Postgres / Dynamo / Elasticsearch / Redis): Speed and stability are really important to us because areas in the world with slower internet connections tend to be where researchers can benefit the most from open access to research
About you:
- You have a curious mind and enjoy tackling hard technical problems
- You work best when given a lot of autonomy
- You want to have a huge impact on a product that is making a positive impact on the world
Please send ashley@academia.edu an email if you would like to apply or if you have any questions.
Academia.edu | Downtown San Francisco | Full Time Engineers | Relocation Available
Academia.edu is an agile startup located in San Francisco on Kearny and Bush Street. Our CEO is Richard Price who received his PhD from Oxford in Philosophy and is an avid sailor. Our team is also led by CTO Ben Lund who is not only a great technical leader, but also an amazing foosball player.
We are well-funded by Khosla Ventures and we are on a mission to Open Science. Our goal as a company is to build an end-to-end publication system that provides the world with free and accessible academic and scientific papers. So far we have 9,364,002 users.
Feel free to check out the technical projects that our engineers are tackling (see below) or visit our hiring page at https://www.academia.edu/hiring to learn more about us. We look forward to hearing from you.
We are Hiring a Team to Build a Better Future
Here at Academia.edu you will have an opportunity to join an agile team of 9 Engineers who are all making a positive impact on the world by contributing to a movement called Open Science. As a member of our team you will be given a lot of autonomy to choose projects that interest you the most and the ability to make product decisions with our CTO Ben Lund and CEO Richard Price.
We are currently tackling five incredibly difficult product challenges. Some of these projects have been attempted by larger companies and have failed. In order to be successful we will need to think way outside-of-the-box and take a leap into the unknown…
Peer Review
We want to build a peer review platform that allows layers of discussion on top of a single document. One of the biggest challenges we face is that contextual commenting at a large scale has yet to be achieved. In order to be successful we need to find original and novel solutions because simple approaches like putting a blog-style comment box at the end of the paper has been tried before and has not been effective.
To build Peer Review we must figure out a way to transform all the wide array of styles from any given PDF paper to a clean and consistent format that is embedded for a suitable commenting UI. We are experimenting to build a rich inline-commenting and discussion interface as well as a reputation system that surfaces quality comments.
Interface Design
We currently have 7.5 million users who upload their research papers. Academia converts these PDFs to HTLM5 to display in the browser. We face the challenges of building web UIs for scientific content such as 3D molecular visualizations and tools for exploring genetic sequences. We will also build back-end parsers, converters, and storage schemes to enable these UIs.
Recommendation Engine
We have a news feed that displays recommended papers to our users. Currently we use a simple rule-based system where papers are tagged by research interests and our users can follow those research interests. In addition, our users can follow each other. We want our users to feel as if they are attending an amazing conference where everything we show them is the most relevant and up-to-date information that is available in their field.
In order to improve our recommendation engine, we will be immersed in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. We want to identify which particular field of the paper it correlates to (math, biochemistry, anthropology, etc.) and the type of document (original research, a review article, a conference presentation, a lecture note or some other content). Using everything from a paper’s previous viewers on Academia.edu to its author and content to its place in the citation graph, we want to determine the relevance of a particular document to a particular user. Lastly, using large-scale data analysis we want to identify trending papers, highlight influential researchers and help the public uncover important new work more quickly and reliably.
Mobile App
Academia does not have a mobile app but we are dedicated to building one!
Working with a clean slate, we will design and build a mobile API that displays Academia’s core features. These features will include the user profile, upload papers, news feed, analytic data, and the ability to make comments on papers (Peer Review). In order to build a dynamic mobile API, we will write easy-to-use client libraries in a wide range of scripting languages that will encourage integration with Academia’s data, content and identity into their apps.
Speed, Scale, & Storage
Our engineering team will have to build highly scalable systems that effectively store and analyze our entire stream of hits. We have built an analytics dashboard so that every user can see how many people viewed their profile and how many people have read their uploaded papers. We enabled this feature by storing structured data in DynamoDB- currently 343 million rows and growing 10% per month. We want to build features that require more sophisticated aggregations on this data than DynamoDB can provide.
Furthermore we will need to figure out how to effectively store massive amounts of data while increasing the speed of our product especially to parts of the world where there is slower internet connections. This is important because areas in the world with slower connections tend to be where researchers can benefit the most from open access to research. Our platform must be useable for them too.
Future at Academia.edu
We have a fun and agile team and we are growing (our site usage grows 10% per month)! We have the resources to make our mission come true. We just raised $11 million from Khosla Ventures, Spark Capital, and True Ventures.
Apply
If you think you would be interested in solving some of these technical problems, then please do not hesitate to contact ashley@academia.edu. Or if you are interested in chatting with our CEO Richard or meeting the team for a game of foosball, then let us know as you are more than welcome to drop by our office in Downtown San Francisco.
Full Time in San Francisco (near the Montgomery Bart Station)
We are part of the Open Science movement. Our agile team of 12 Engineers are building a disruptive platform that will allow researchers to share their work more quickly, obtain greater peer-review coverage, and innovate faster. We are building this platform using Rails, Coffeescript, Backbone, PostgreSQL, and hosting it on AWS.
Our interview process is very straight forward: apply to hiring@academia.edu and Ashley John will respond to your email within 48 hours. We are seeking developers who love to code, who want to use their technical skills to make a huge difference, work in a fast paced startup, and enjoy solving complex technical challenges. We offer amazing perks including an unlimited book budget. We devour books!
We look forward to hearing from you.