Staff Software Engineer, Academia

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

• 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
• 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

• 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
• 401k plan, and stock options

Total funding: $56.8m

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.