Senior Software Engineer, Full-stack - Publishing

At Academia.edu, our mission is to accelerate and democratize the world’s research, making scientific discovery faster and more impactful for everyone. We are the world’s leading platform for researchers, with 294M users worldwide and over 40% of academic faculty engaging monthly.

We’re a profitable, venture-backed company headquartered in San Francisco, and we’re building the future of open access publishing through Academia.edu Journals. This growing division is focused on creating the world’s highest-impact open-access journals—and we’re looking for talented engineers to help us realize that vision.

We’re looking for a Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer to join our Publishing team. You’ll build the tools and platform that support world-class open-access journals, collaborating closely with our editorial teams, product management, and fellow engineers.

This role is highly cross-functional: you’ll be working with both technical and non-technical stakeholders to troubleshoot, problem-solve, develop and deliver software solutions that improve and support the Publishing team’s productivity.

• Strong verbal and written English skills**Please submit your resume and all application materials in English**

• Clear communications and collaboration skills with non-tech stakeholders.

• Strong CS fundamentals: database modeling, OOD/OOP, software architecture, application design etc.

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills to build solutions and products.

• 7+ years of professional software development experience designing and building large scale systems, consumer-facing web apps, or web platforms in a Unix/Linux environment.

• Full stack web apps development is a must

• Professional level coding proficiency with one of the following; Ruby, Python, or Node.js+Javascript or Typescript.

• Must be willing to learn and work with Ruby on Rails stack quickly.

• Ability to learn and apply AI coding tools (e.g. Cursor, Claude Code)

• Strong product judgment: know when to optimize, when to ship, and how to balance impact vs. effort.

• Timezone alignment: Start work at 9am CET with availability until 11am PT at least twice a week. Flexible schedule to accommodate you and the team.

• Willingness to travel occasionally (HQ onboarding + 3–4 offsites/year).

Bonus: Team leadership experience is desirable, background in publishing and experience working for US-based tech companies in a distributed remote-first environment.

• Ruby on Rails, Sidekiq

• PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch

• React + Typescript

• RSpec, Chromatic, Jest, Storybook

• CircleCI, Jenkins, Ansible, Terraform, Datadog

• AWS ecosystem (EC2, S3, RDS, Redshift, Aurora, etc)

• Various Gen-AI, LLMs, Agents and AI coding tools.

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

• Support & operations

  • Handle support requests across our editorial tools, resolving issues quickly, communicating progress clearly.

  • Identify recurring issues and recommend long-term solutions

• Feature development

  • Build and ship features using Ruby on Rails, React, AWS

  • Balance speed with quality by using strong product judgement to prioritize what needs to be perfect vs not.

• Cross-team communication

  • Partner with editorial operations, engineers, and leadership to solve problems.

  • Communicate progress clearly via Slack, documentation, async updates for stakeholders.

• Competitive compensation and Benefits

• Professional and personal development

• Work from home, with flexible hours

• Impact the future of academic publishing at global scale