Staff Software Engineer

About Us 

Academia.edu is a venture-backed, for-profit, and profitable company based in San Francisco. We are recognized as the world’s leading platform for researchers and scholars to share work, discover research, and connect with academics globally. Our bold vision is to democratize and accelerate the world's research, enhancing the speed of scientific discovery and technological progress for the benefit of everyone. We imagine a world where accessing academic papers is effortless, keeping track of cutting-edge research is seamless and collaborating with researchers is easier than ever before. Our platform empowers millions of scholars worldwide to push the boundaries of human understanding. We believe that academic research is a lever that improves the progress of humanity, and our commitment to this mission drives everything we do.

Join us as we continue to redefine what's possible in the world of research. Discover careers that challenge, inspire and propel you toward a future where your ideas can truly change the world. At Academia.edu, we're not just shaping the future of research—we're shaping the future of possibilities.

Please note that this role is in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Our office comes alive on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays! Three times a week, our Bay Area team gathers in our office located in San Francisco's Financial District (580 California St) for All Hands meetings, collaborative sessions, innovation-driven brainstorming, and events that bring us closer together. Our space has everything we need—from cozy rooms for 1:1 mentoring and focused work to larger rooms designed for team activities.

What we're looking for

Our ideal candidates have experience working full stack and are excited about owning product and engineering initiatives. Experience scaling web applications with an increasing user base into the millions is desirable.

Responsibilities:

• Technical lead for designing, building, and testing major software components, systems, features, and products.
• Collaborate with Product and Design to build innovative software products and solutions.
• Own team OKRs for timely, high-quality outcomes.
• Influence and mentor multiple teams as a technical leader.
• Architect, build, and test large-scale production-level code.
• Solve complex product development problems and adhere to best practices.
• Understands business objectives and the necessary processes to achieve them.

Your skillset:

• Good coding habits are a must.
• Knowledge and use of common data structures and algorithms to solve problems.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills to build solutions and products.
• Ability and willingness to learn new languages and technologies as needed
• 7+yrs. professional software development experience designing and building large scalable systems, consumer-facing web apps, or web platforms in a Unix/Linux environment
• Experience as a technical team lead, influencing the work of multiple teams on projects.
• Experience as the technical owner of key projects. 
• Experience architecting, implementing, and testing large-scale production-level code.
• Proven record solving complex product development problems.
• Professional coding proficiency with one of the following: Ruby, Python, or Node.js+Javascript or Node.js+Typescript. 
• Must be willing to learn/use a Ruby on Rails stack.
• A solid understanding of database modeling, data manipulation, and querying is a must.
• Rest API coding in a scripting language.
• Web Front-end coding experience, e.g., JavaScript, Typescript, React.js, a plus.

Our Tech stack:

• Ruby on Rails, Sidekiq
• PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch
• React + Typescript
• RSpec, Chromatic, Jest, Storybook
• CircleCI, Jenkins, Ansible, Terraform, Datadog
• AWS ecosystem (EC2, S3, RDS, Redshift, Aurora, and many others)




You don’t need to know our tech stack, but you must be willing and able to learn and apply it quickly!

What you’ll work on:

• You'll be designing and building systems and web applications to make our user base more productive on our platform. Here are some things that we are currently working on:
• A fast and scalable peer review system that identifies and distributes high-quality academic works.
• Services that help academic authors understand the impact of their scholarship via text parsing and computation of bibliometrics.
• Algorithmic approaches to identification of academic content and disambiguation of authorships in order to make every paper ever written available for free.
• A paper recommendation engine that helps users discover the most relevant research.
• A people recommendation engine that helps users connect with others who share their interests.
• Search Engine Optimizations to improve the discoverability of our corpus of 55M+ PDFs.

What impact will you have?

• Researchers from all over the world give us fantastic feedback:
• “I go through all the articles in the bulk download, save the ones that are clearly going to be useful, and discard the remainder. This saves loads of time but also points me in directions I might not otherwise have thought of looking.”
• “The bulk downloads give me the chance to read more related articles as well as see what research is citing the article I am looking at. It also helps me rapidly expand my personal digital library of references.”
• See more: https://www.academia.edu




Compensation

We value diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We encourage applications from individuals of all backgrounds and experiences.

Benefits

Comprehensive Healthcare Coverage: 100% employer-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents

Generous Time Off: 21 paid vacation days, 12 paid company holidays, and unlimited sick days; paid parental leave and other leaves for life’s needs; 6-week paid sabbatical every 4 years

Flexible Work Arrangements: Flexible daily schedules within a hybrid work environment, annual remote-office budget, and monthly WFH internet stipend

Competitive Compensation: Competitive salary, 401k plan, and stock options

Mission-Driven Company: Join a mission-driven company to accelerate and democratize the world’s research

Learn more on our Careers Page!

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.