San Francisco, CA. Full time. H1Bs welcome.
Academia.edu is an engineering-focused company whose goal is to revolutionize the way that researchers share research. We are the largest and fastest-growing platform in the world for academics to share research. Over 700,000 academics have signed up, and 90,000 are joining each month. The value that the site provides is that we help academics distribute their papers to a large audience quickly, and we also help them keep up with the latest papers in their field.
We have about 2.7 million monthly unique visitors, and that number is doubling roughly every 7 months. The journey is 1% complete - we are just getting going.
We're a 6 person team based in downtown San Francisco. We have a strong engineering culture. We're a Rails site, and we also use Redis, MongoDB, Beanstalkd, Varnish, Solr, PostgreSQL, Node.js and Memcached.
Familiarity with our technologies is a plus, but it's not essential. It's far more important that you are a quick learner who can pick up new technologies quickly. There is more information about the company on our hiring page, at <a href="http://academia.edu/hiring" >http://academia.edu/hiring</a>. The kinds of things you would be working on include:
★ building new features (a conference feature, a discussion feature for papers)
★ enhancing existing features (News Feed, Profile page, paper upload tools)
★ building back-end infrastructure to scale the site
What we're looking for are:
☀ 2+ years of web development experience
☀ Experience with the full engineering stack
☀ Passion for engineering
We have raised money from Spark Capital (investors in Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare), and angels including Mark Shuttleworth (from Ubuntu) and Rupert Pennant-Rea (Chairman of The Economist).
All the strategic decisions in the startup are made collaboratively, whether they are about hiring, new feature development, user growth, user retention, funding, or revenue. You can participate in those general startup decisions as much or as little as you want. We have found that our decisions are much better as a result of everyone contributing to them. If you like having an impact, you will enjoy the Academia.edu culture.
For anyone interested to learn more, please email me directly at richard [at] academia.edu.
Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (November 2011)