Senior Software Engineer, PubPub

Accepting applications until Friday, December 15, 2023.

Knowledge Futures is hiring a software developer to help us develop the next phase of PubPub, a collaborative and open publishing tool for the academic web. We’re looking for someone with strong full-stack web development skills. You’ll get to experiment and make significant contributions to product direction. We will pay you competitively, let you work a 4-day, 32-hour week from wherever you want, and take you and your ideas seriously. Join us!

Knowledge Futures, founded as a partnership between the MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab, is a non-profit institution that builds public digital infrastructure that enables communities to publish documents and data more effectively.

PubPub is an open-source publishing tool used by thousands of journals, conferences, books, and other diverse types of communities. At its heart, it features a collaborative document editor with strong support for academic standards. Layered on top are features for discussion and organization. In the works are powerful tools for editorial review and enabling small and large communities to thrive on PubPub. Underlying all of this is a belief that better publishing tools can help researchers focus on doing the best work of their lives, rather than adapting their work to the whims of rent-seekers and gatekeepers.

• Lead the planning and implementation of key parts of PubPub’s frontend and backend.
• Identify opportunities and problems based on user feedback and work with the product team to design features to address them.
• Work with the team to organize and manage open-source issues, features requests, and project goals into a coherent development timeline that can be acted upon.
• Champion best practices internally and externally to the open-source development community.

• You’re an experienced Web developer with an interest in advancing the original use-case for the Web: bringing research communities together.
• You have significant daily professional experience making large contributions to actively used web applications, across the stack. We use React, Node.js, and Postgres; your level of experience with these tools is much less important than your readiness to learn them.
• You have a solid grounding in what makes a backend secure, performant, and maintainable, and what makes a frontend snappy, intuitive, and accessible.
• You want to work on a team that respects your ideas about the design, user experience, and ethics of software, not just the code you produce.
• You want to build tools that empower people without preying on them.
• You’re ready to work on a small product team that will expect you to make and own significant decisions about software architecture, and engage with questions about product and design.
• You want breathing room to experiment, be thoughtful, and get things right, but without losing sight of an active user base and an ambitious roadmap.

Benefits

• Work 4 days per week with a thoughtfully distributed team: we were a remote team before it was a global necessity, and put a lot of effort into making the remote experience a great one. Last summer, we experimented with working 4 days per week (8 hours per day), and never looked back. Learn more about how we work in our Handbook. As it becomes safe to travel and gather again, we are resuming our roughly biannual in-person team retreats at fun locations throughout the U.S., which began with our Vermont retreat in the fall of 2021, NYC "field trip" in spring 2022, and New Orleans retreat in fall 2022.
• Enjoy industry-standard perks: a minimum of 5 weeks off per year that we require you to actually use, best-in-class health benefits with generous company contributions, 401k with generous matching, your own computer of choice, a stipend for setting up your home office, and the ability to work 4 days per week, fully remote — with regular in-person team retreats as safety allows — with a team that prioritizes remote participation.
• Contribute to our larger mission at Knowledge Futures: we’re building a future where the infrastructure to create, access and validate knowledge is controlled by people who serve the public interest, which we apply to our own work. As a KF team member, you’ll be able to contribute to building the company itself and documenting those efforts, as well as engage in larger industry conversations.

You must be legally authorized to work in the United States to apply for this role.

We welcome applicants from diverse backgrounds with diverse skillsets. If you have significant personal experience or engagement with low-income communities, international communities, or fields and languages that are underrepresented in academia, scholarly publishing, or open data, we strongly encourage you to apply.

This job description is intended to be a guidepost, not a checklist. If you feel like you could do a great job in this role, even if you don’t exactly meet every qualification, please consider applying. And if you’re still hesitant after reading this bold text, send us a short note anyway with any questions you have about qualifications.

The salary for this position is $152,377 (Engineering Team, level 3) plus benefits. In late 2022 we implemented a no-negotiation salary system designed to increase fairness and transparency and reduce bias in compensation by paying the same salary in each function/level across the company regardless of location or tenure. We base starting salaries on industry medians in New York City (no matter where you're based), automatically adjust twice per year to account for cost of living so you don't need to demand raises or seek offers elsewhere, and provide clear pathways for promotion with large compensation increases (while not requiring you to seek promotion to stay in good standing and keep up with inflation/industry trends). Read our full compensation policy for more details.