Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2014)

We are looking for a Senior Software Developer for full-time employment. You will be part of the core team helping to build and architect the backend of our main product.

Surfly provides the easiest way to share a web page or a document on the web. Unlike traditional screen sharing it requires no installation or browser plugins and is limited to a web page rather than the whole screen. By using a smart content-rewriting proxy we allow any website to be shared, without website owners having to change them in any way.

More about the job: http://www.surfly.com/jobs/

Reach me at denis@surfly.com

You will be surrounded by brilliant, compassionate team members. This is an inspirational place to evolve as an entrepreneur and programmer, and the elite level of leadership among the founders, who are also professors at Stanford Graduate School of Business, is unparalleled. The networking and mentorship opportunities are truly amazing when immersed in this environment. Happy to chat more.

Product Data Analyst https://slice.resumetracker.com/public/job_detail/1093

What's the job

We are seeking a Product Data Analyst to join the Slice Intelligence Measurement Science team. This person will support daily qa of critical, time sensitive, client bound data. The analyst will use his or her data analytical skills and attention to detail to quality stamp the data before it leaves Slice’s doors. Ability to thrive and succeed in a fast-paced start-up environment is the key to success.

Responsibilities:

· Conducting qa on data and reports

· Writing sql queries to pull data from database

· Use of BI tool such as Tableau to help with qa inquiries

· Signing off on reports before they are supplied to clients

· Recommending novel approaches to data qa and implementing them

Requirements:

· Bachelors with a quant background high desirable

· Familiarity with SQL a big plus

· Training or education with statistical methods a big plus

· Good communications skills and positive demeanor

· Willingness to learn and grow

Who we are:

Founded by proven entrepreneurs out of Stanford, Slice is a consumer internet company based in downtown Palo Alto that is venture backed by Lightspeed, DCM, Eric Schmidt and other top Valley investors.

We're a bright and talented team that's chock-full of consumer internet experience with a passion for delighting our users through amazing product experiences and thoughtful customer service.

Oh and we LOVE to have fun!

What we do:

Slice is solving a very big and important problem: we're changing the way that people interact with the stuff they buy AFTER they buy it. And we're doing this by tackling it at the source of where people get their electronic receipts: the email inbox.

We're using email data to create fun and useful consumer applications and experiences. Our popular flagship app for iOS and Android provides an easy way for consumers to manage & track all of their purchases and even save money with price drop alerts.

Why we're cool:

Well our users certainly think we are (check out the reviews on the app stores). But the media love us as well!

We've been named one of 7 "Startups to Watch" by Inc. Magazine, and to Entrepreneur Magazine's list of 100 Brilliant Companies.

We've also gotten tons of shoutouts from the press and media such as the NBC's Today Show, Real Simple, CNN, and Lifehacker just to name a few.

Resumes/Linkedin/project pages/portfolios to hannahft@stanfordalumni.org

WORK with CEO Richard Price WORK with CTO Ben Lund WORK with 9 Senior Engineers WORK with the mission to make life better

BUILD a killer recommendation engine immersed in Machine Learning and NLP BUILD our next major platform called “Peer Review” from Scratch TACKLE all things related to Scalability, Storage, and Speed VENTURE into mobile

HACK because that’s what you love to do CONTRIBUTE to positive changes OPEN SCIENCE, join ACADEMIA.EDU

We are Hiring a Team to Build a Better Future

Here at Academia.edu you will have an opportunity to join an agile team of 9 Engineers who are all making a positive impact on the world by contributing to a movement called Open Science. As a member of our team you will be given a lot of autonomy to choose projects that interest you the most and the ability to make product decisions with our CTO Ben Lund and CEO Richard Price.

We are currently tackling five incredibly difficult product challenges. Some of these projects have been attempted by larger companies and have failed. In order to be successful we will need to think way outside-of-the-box and take a leap into the unknown…

Peer Review

We want to build a peer review platform that allows layers of discussion on top of a single document. One of the biggest challenges we face is that contextual commenting at a large scale has yet to be achieved. In order to be successful we need to find original and novel solutions because simple approaches like putting a blog-style comment box at the end of the paper has been tried before and has not been effective.

To build Peer Review we must figure out a way to transform all the wide array of styles from any given PDF paper to a clean and consistent format that is embedded for a suitable commenting UI. We are experimenting to build a rich inline-commenting and discussion interface as well as a reputation system that surfaces quality comments.

Interface Design

We currently have 7.5 million users who upload their research papers. Academia converts these PDFs to HTLM5 to display in the browser. We face the challenges of building web UIs for scientific content such as 3D molecular visualizations and tools for exploring genetic sequences. We will also build back-end parsers, converters, and storage schemes to enable these UIs.

Recommendation Engine

We have a news feed that displays recommended papers to our users. Currently we use a simple rule-based system where papers are tagged by research interests and our users can follow those research interests. In addition, our users can follow each other. We want our users to feel as if they are attending an amazing conference where everything we show them is the most relevant and up-to-date information that is available in their field.

In order to improve our recommendation engine, we will be immersed in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. We want to identify which particular field of the paper it correlates to (math, biochemistry, anthropology, etc.) and the type of document (original research, a review article, a conference presentation, a lecture note or some other content). Using everything from a paper’s previous viewers on Academia.edu to its author and content to its place in the citation graph, we want to determine the relevance of a particular document to a particular user. Lastly, using large-scale data analysis we want to identify trending papers, highlight influential researchers and help the public uncover important new work more quickly and reliably.

Mobile App

Academia does not have a mobile app but we are dedicated to building one!

Working with a clean slate, we will design and build a mobile API that displays Academia’s core features. These features will include the user profile, upload papers, news feed, analytic data, and the ability to make comments on papers (Peer Review). In order to build a dynamic mobile API, we will write easy-to-use client libraries in a wide range of scripting languages that will encourage integration with Academia’s data, content and identity into their apps.

Speed, Scale, & Storage

Our engineering team will have to build highly scalable systems that effectively store and analyze our entire stream of hits. We have built an analytics dashboard so that every user can see how many people viewed their profile and how many people have read their uploaded papers. We enabled this feature by storing structured data in DynamoDB- currently 343 million rows and growing 10% per month. We want to build features that require more sophisticated aggregations on this data than DynamoDB can provide.

Furthermore we will need to figure out how to effectively store massive amounts of data while increasing the speed of our product especially to parts of the world where there is slower internet connections. This is important because areas in the world with slower connections tend to be where researchers can benefit the most from open access to research. Our platform must be useable for them too.

Future at Academia.edu

We have a fun and agile team and we are growing (our site usage grows 10% per month)! We have the resources to make our mission come true. We just raised $11 million from Khosla Ventures, Spark Capital, and True Ventures. We're based in Downtown San Francisco.

Chat with Ashley

If you think you would be interested in solving some of these technical problems then please do not hesitate to contact ashley[at]academia.edu.

I'm an experienced dev (3+ years of wholesome experience + a solid work portfolio) and I could even deal with the rather significant pay cut I'd be taking... but a pay cut + risking not having employment, when I'm already settled in a current job?

No thanks.

But good luck.

Profitable B2B Startup by Ex-Google + Ex-Microsoft + Ex-Amazon folks.

Full Stack Developer with focus on JS/CoffeeScript/BackBone/PHP

Full Listing: http://goo.gl/nop85U