Director of Platform & Infrastructure, Academia
$216-293k
+ Stock options
More information about location
3 days a week in office (Financial District, SF)
A platform for academics to share research papers
Open for applications
A platform for academics to share research papers
101-200 employees
Open for applications
$216-293k
+ Stock options
More information about location
3 days a week in office (Financial District, SF)
101-200 employees
Company mission
Academia.edu is on a mission to accelerate the world's research. Their goal is to speed up research in every domain - finding a solution to climate change; finding cures for diseases; evolving artificial intelligence.
Role
Who you are
- Versatile Technologist: Manages and optimizes mature, stable products while integrating new solutions, ensuring smooth transitions and ongoing system improvements
- Clear Communicator: Effectively communicates technical concepts and plans to both technical and non-technical audiences, ensuring infrastructure goals are aligned with broader company objectives
- Effective Collaborator: Works with other technical leaders and the executive team to build trust and ensure all partners are aligned
- Analytical Decision-Maker: Strongly prefers using data, metrics and rigorous, written analysis rather than gut and experience to accurately identify challenges and ensure that solutions are effectively tailored to address them
- Impact-Oriented Leader: Prioritizes projects and initiatives based on their potential to benefit growth and stability, focusing efforts where the impact will be greatest
- Technical Expertise
- Over 10 years of experience in SRE, DevOps, or Software Engineering, with leadership roles involving operating on public clouds like AWS, GCP, and Azure, with a strong preference for AWS experience
- Proficient in managing large-scale web infrastructures, skilled in optimizing both legacy and contemporary systems, and well-versed in Linux environments and technologies like Docker and Kubernetes
- Expert in dynamic web frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Django, proficient in managing, troubleshooting, and optimizing a large, mature codebase
- Comfortably advocates for a robust, well-maintained monolith architecture and empowers skilled developers with sharp, powerful tools
- Experienced in utilizing tools like Terraform, Ansible, or Chef for configuration management and in automating cloud-based deployments
- Highly adept at scaling and securing databases using SQL and NoSQL technologies
What the job involves
- Our new Director of Infrastructure will lead an existing team of 6 Platform and Infrastructure engineers, grow the team according to the hiring plan, and own our Infrastructure roadmap and initiatives
- Strategic Planning and Execution:
- Creates plans that turn big ideas from leadership into clear steps for the near and far future
- Takes projects from start to finish, keeping them on track and within budget. Able to dive deep into details and operate at a granular level
- Looks after system design, development, and operations, ensuring they work well now and can grow to meet future needs
- Team Management:
- Hire, grow and develop a team of 6 (and growing) Infrastructure and Site Reliability Engineers
- Sets clear goals and manages performance, offering regular feedback to help team members grow professionally
- Improves team dynamics and productivity by fostering a culture of high achievement and continuous improvement, and keeping work processes efficient
- Communication and Coordination:
- Explains plans clearly, making sure everyone from the team to top management understands what’s going on and why it matters
- Improves teamwork, encouraging everyone to talk openly and align their efforts towards common goals
- Keeps all stakeholders informed about project progress and important developments
- Quickly handles problems, spotting any slip-ups early and sorting them out fast, while keeping everyone affected in the know
- As the leader of this department, you will direct new initiatives that are akin to the successful projects previously completed by your team
- To give you a sense of the groundwork laid before, here’s a look at some of the key projects that have shaped our current technological framework, and some projects currently on the roadmap
- In this role, you will guide your team through similar challenges and opportunities with a focus on continuity and innovation
- Operations and Systems Management:
- Use pgBackRest to improve our PostgreSQL backup processes
- Upgrade and resizing Aurora clusters for more efficient utilization
- Transition system components to private networks to enhance security
- Teach teams how to manage and report on their AWS spending effectively
- Strengthen system defenses with AWS Shield and advanced firewall setups
- Development Environment and CI/CD:
- Include static analysis tools like Brakeman in our CI/CD pipeline to routinely check for security vulnerabilities
- Refine our software deployment process to make releases more reliable and efficient
- Enhance the reliability of the test suite to ensure higher software quality
- Provide tools like DBLab to enable developers to use production-like data safely, boosting development speed and accuracy
- Streamline development with containerized environments that mimic production settings
Our take
Academia.edu is pitched as a social media platform to help researchers and academics share papers for free - with over 185 million registered users and over 30 million visitors per month, it has remained an active and popular platform since its founding in 2008.
The company has had a chequered relationship with the academics it proposes to serve (and the institutions it intends to disrupt). Some claim the new paywalled suite of features runs counter to the free and open-access model; others balk at their use of the .edu domain usually reserved for academic institutions (they registered before its use became restricted).
Perhaps to overcome these obstacles, and to give them an edge over the increasing preference for competitors like ResearchGate and Google Scholar, Academia.edu have taken some interesting steps. One was to develop a mobile app for the platform. Another was the early 2020 acquisition of entrepreneurial training and toolkit platform The Start-Up Gate. This latter decision could signal an exciting new developmental direction for Academia.edu - but thus far, the motivation remains unclear.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Few candidates hear
back within 2 weeks
4% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Feb 2022
$23m
SERIES D
Mar 2019
$16m
SERIES C
Total funding: $56.2m
Company benefits
- 21 days of paid vacation and 11 paid holidays per year
- 8 weeks of paid bonding parental leave plus 8 weeks of birth parent leave
- 6 weeks of fully-paid sabbatical leave for every four years you work here
- Book stipend
- Catered lunch
- Stock options
- Work from home opportunities
- Health insurance
- 401k
- FSA
- Activities
- Commuter benefits
Company values
- Mission Oriented
- Kindness
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Articles
Leadership
Richard Price
(CEO)Studied PPE at Oxford, going on to complete a PhD in Philosophy. Founded two other businesses: LiveOut.co.uk, and PeopleRadar.co.uk. For 7 years was a Fellow of All Souls College at Oxford University.
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