Open Positions
What you'll be working on
- News Feed: Creating a fast and relevant news feed
- Profile: Making a profile page that celebrates an academic's research
- New Features: Conceiving and developing new features that create a great experience for researchers
- Discussion: Creating Q&A tools and a discussion platform around papers
- Papers: Optimizing the upload, download, and sharing experience
- Speed: Improving performance, both on the back-end and front end
- Stats: Building a great set of analytics tools for us and our users
- Architecture: Scaling the site to support an increasing number of users
Mission
Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. Our mission is to accelerate the world's research.
It's widely held that science is too closed, and too slow. We are trying to change that. We believe that faster sharing of research will lead to an acceleration in research innovation: faster innovation in medicine, biology, engineering, economics, and other fields.
Faster sharing in biology and medicine, for example, could lead to cancer being cured 12 months before it otherwise would have been, which would lead to millions of lives being saved.
Some of our thoughts about how science is changing are in this blog post: The Future of Peer Review. You can see a video of the founder of Academia.edu, Richard Price, talk about Academia.edu, and the future of science at our 1 million user party http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOpKL4eHbyk
The journey is 1% complete. We are an engineering-focused company, and we need talented engineers to join us, and help build a better way for academics to share research.
Traction
Academia.edu has 1,325,447 registered users, and over 3.6 million monthly unique visitors. Both of these metrics tripled in 2011. Over 4,500 papers are added to the platform each day, and over 3,000 academics join each day.
We are the largest and fastest-growing platform in the world for academics to share their research papers.
The Culture
Academia.edu has a very engineering-driven culture. We care obsessively about building high-quality software.
Exceptional Engineering
Intellectual satisfaction from finding the most robust and efficient solutions to the complex problems that arise in web development.
Technical Ambition
Pushing the boundaries of the technologies we work with, without being afraid to build whatever's necessary to do the job properly.
Personal Investment
Passion for building a platform that could change the way that research is shared and discovered for millions of people around the world.
Independent Thought
Being able to learn from the people around us but challenge them when they need to be challenged.
Creativity
Constantly thinking of new ways to improve the product and user experience.
Vision
Thinking, "What will the world look like in 10 years' time, and how can we build that now?"
Benefits & Perks
You'll get a market salary and stock options. We look to hire exceptional people, and we're generous with stock options to make that happen.
- a laptop and external monitor
- a smartphone of your choice
- an ergonomic chair
- health insurance
- bi-weekly hack nights
Investors
We have raised $6.7 million from a range of investors including:
Spark Capital
True Ventures
Spark Ventures
Mark Shuttleworth
Founder of Thawte and Ubuntu
Rupert Pennant-Rea
Chairman of The Economist
Thomas Lehrman
Co-founder of Gerson Lehrman Group
H-1Bs and international candidates
We love international candidates! We will handle all the visa issues on your behalf. Of our 6 person team, 4 have visas, so we are familiar with the process.