Open Positions at Academia.edu
Software Engineer
- 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. Read more...
Professional qualities – you are:
About Academia.edu
Academia.edu helps academics answer the question ‘who’s researching what?’. It applies to any research area: you can type in ‘thermophilic organisms’, or one of 12,420 other research interests, and find out who is working in that area worldwide, as well as what they are working on – the latest papers, conferences, blog posts, status updates etc.
Vision
Our vision is for every researcher in the world to be on Academia.edu, and every piece of research content to be channeled through Academia.edu, and accessible in realtime to the people who are interested in it. We are firm believers that a research platform as powerful as this will exist in 5 years’ time, and we want to be the ones to build it. The goal is to impact people’s research lives as much as Facebook has impacted people’s social lives.
Progress
Academia.edu launched 11 months ago, and is now one of the largest online communities of researchers in the world; we now have 77,954 profiles, and about 300,000 unique monthly visitors.
Team
There are three of us on the team right now:
Richard Price CEO, did a Ph.D at Oxford in philosophy, and won the All Souls Prize Fellowship there, which is awarded to two students a year in the Humanities from Oxford's undergraduates and graduates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Souls_College,_Oxford. Richard previously founded www.peopleradar.com, which was the largest application on the Facebook API 1.0 for 8 months, and www.liveout.co.uk, a student rental site in Oxford.
Ben Lund CTO, did a BA at Cambridge. After that, he became project lead on Connotea, which grew to be one of the two leading academic bookmarking applications on the web (like Delicious, but for academics). Ben has built a search engine for the World Health Organization, and also integrated Google Health into Praxeon, a leading medical search engine. Both Ben and Richard are ‘aliens of extraordinary ability’ according to the US Immigration office (they are ‘aliens’ from the UK).
Jarques Pretorius Lead front-end designer/developer. Jarques recently graduated from the Art Institute of California – San Francisco, where he won the award for best portfolio. Jarques’s designs can be seen at www.jpretorius.com.
We currently have one intern:
Carson Roen: graduated from Pepperdine, and created the advertising startup www.eBUSlive.com, a unique and innovative blend of the online and public mediums. Carson runs Academia.edu’s marketing projects.
Investors
We have raised venture capital from:
Spark Ventures |
HOWZAT Media (founders of Cheapflights.com) |
The Accelerator Group |
Brent Hoberman (founder of Lastminute.com) |
Heidi Hsueh (founder of pAsia, formerly one of the biggest Internet companies in the greater China area). |
Caravel Capital |
Working at Academia.edu
Our motto is “cap production deploy”. We care obsessively about building and deploying high quality software. Some of our priorities in feature development are:
- Something people want: the feature should clearly meet a strong need/desire, and be the highest on our list of priorities
- Fast development: our goal is to finish and deploy products.
- Careful development: we want the feature to be well architected and easily modifiable and extensible
We are based in North Beach, San Francisco, with amazing 8th floor views of the bay. Everyone discusses everything in the company. No topic is left un-discussed. You should hopefully enjoy this kind of atmosphere!
Open Positions:
