We are looking for an exceptional software engineer to join our team. Academia.edu has a very engineer-driven culture. We describe below how we think about our culture, and also the qualities of the person we want to join us.

Professional qualities – you are:

• An exceptional engineer: you are able to innovate at the cutting edge of web development to overcome the complex challenges that can arise.
• Product and user experience focused: you are obsessed with creating a great product, and a great user experience. You feel anguish and pain when your site is slow, or when your user interface or feature is bad, and you feel pleasure when the site is fast and intuitive.
• A problem solver: you derive huge intellectual satisfaction from solving problems. You are always focused on finding the best and quickest solution to the problem you are working on.
• Technically ambitious: you are the kind of person who enjoys pushing the boundaries of the technologies you work with. For example, when thinking about the best UI for a feature, you would have no fear in considering creating a new JavaScript framework, if that is what is required to make it work right.
• A finisher: you care about finishing products and deploying code. You understand that exceptional engineering, combined with exceptional creativity, are what makes a startup succeed.
• Versatile: you are comfortable tweaking a CSS style or optimizing a SQL query all in the same morning
• Able to prioritize features: you can look at a ton of possible features on a whiteboard, be able to add your own ideas to the mix, and then intelligently choose which one has the highest priority
• Thoughtful about productivity: you think about what working environments and structures make you optimally productive. You try to ensure that the right environment and structures are in place for you.
• Dedicated: you are willing to get up at 4am to restart the servers, and then build something the next day so the servers don’t go down again
• Personally invested in what you work on: you care personally about the impact of your work on people around the world

Personal qualities – you are:

• An independent thinker: you are able to learn from people around you when you need to, and also challenge them when they need to be challenged
• Inquisitive: you naturally think of ways of improving things that you interact with
• Creative: you are able to develop new ideas for the product and enhance the vision of the company
• Excited about Academia.edu: you are excited about building a platform that could change the way that research is shared and discovered.
• Keen to have an impact on the world around you: you are keen to be the one to build the platform behind Academia.edu. You don’t just want it to happen: you want the challenge of building it yourself. Positively improving the lives of millions of people via software is something that really excites you.
• Visionary: you are the kind of person who thinks ‘What will the world look like in 10 years’ time, and how can we build that now?’

Experience

What is most important, by far, is that you are a quick learner who can discover and pick up new techniques fast.

• Web development: you have 2+ years of web development experience
• Full stack: you have experience designing and implementing the full stack of a web application: sysadmin, database implementation and optimization, application development, front-end CSS, HTML and JavaScript.
• Scaling: ideally you have some experience scaling an application to deal with an increasing user base. This is not essential though.

Here are some of the technologies that we work with:

• Ruby on Rails
• ActionScript 3
• Jquery
• Nginx
• PostgreSQL
• HAProxy
• Mongrel
• Memcached
• Scribd/iPaper API
• Facebook Connect

You should be comfortable finding the right tools for the job while becoming great at whatever tool you're using. Experience with Rails is a plus, but far more important is your ability to pick up new technologies quickly.

On offer

Apart from an incredibly fun engineering and product challenge, we offer some nice benefits!

You will get a market salary and stock options. We want to hire someone exceptional, and we want to be generous with stock options to make this happen. In addition, you will also get health insurance, any ergonomic chair of your choosing, a laptop with two huge monitors, and a smartphone with monthly bills paid.

The job is based in San Francisco. We will help with visas and other issues relating to re-location.

If you are interested to learn more, please email Richard Price at . To make your application stand out, please sign up to Academia.edu, and let us know what you think of the site:

• - what is good about the user experience, and what is bad
• - what features we have that you think are good, and which are bad, or which are missing

If you are not affiliated with a university, you can sign up to the Independent Researcher section of Academia.edu at http://independent.academia.edu. Please be as detailed as possible in your comments on the site.