Sparrho

Sparrho combines human and artificial intelligence to help you track science, real-time.

Founded 2013
1-15 employees
  • Education
  • Headquarters address
    London, United Kingdom
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    Sparrho combines human and artificial intelligence to help you stay on top of the science that matters to you.

    With 47,000,000+ items from 45,000+ journals and preprint servers, Sparrho has the world's most comprehensive, structured repository of scientific content, and the most accurate content recommendations, enhanced by world-class researchers from 1,500+ universities in 120+ countries.

    Sparrho was founded in 2013 out of frustration with existing literature search tools by two Oxbridge scientists, and now has an amazing team based in London, UK.

    "Sparrho is an incredible resource for anyone who values research and real-time science! I've been playing with it in my own research activities for about a year now and I've got to say that it puts Google Scholar absolutely to shame."
    -- Kristin, testimonial on Product Hunt

    Job Description
    We’re looking for an amazing all-round dev to take a senior position on the team. Someone who picks up new languages for fun, understands ideas half-way through the explanation, and hits things with a hammer (real or metaphorical) to find out how they work. Skill and flexibility are key to this role.

    Our technology is the foundation of everything we do, and we’ll use whatever’s available to give users a response faster than they can blink, even across 70 million+ pieces of content. Our core stack is Clojurescript with Om/React on the front end, Node.js on the back end with PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch to keep our data front and center, Redis for sub-millisecond lookups, and Docker to keep everything on AWS running smoothly.

    You’ll be joining a small team and moving quickly you’ll need the experience to make the right technical decisions to build fast, scalable tech that the business needs: everything from content acquisition to performance tuning, from UI changes to totally new product features.

    You will be:
    • Working with our small but high quality product and technology team.
    • Putting together major, brand new site functionality for both users and commercial partners.
    • Keeping web servers lightning fast under any load they might experience.
    • Turning ideas from the team into tangible features on Sparrho.
    • Working with publisher and provider data to keep content flowing to our users.
    • Staying on top of the latest developments to make sure we’re always using the best tools for the job.
    • Ensuring that search clusters and database servers maintain peak performance as incoming content increases.

    Ideal Skills and Experience
    • You'll know Node.js and React inside out, and whilst you may not have Clojurescript experience, you'll be able to programme in several languages already.
    • You’ll have experience with large SQL databases; Elasticsearch experience isn’t necessary, but it’s a big plus.
    • Ability to quickly understand and use new tools and technologies.
    • Strong technical background and a real interest in the cutting edge of development.
    • Focus on fast, efficient solutions to real-world user problems.
    • Deep understanding of data storage technologies, particularly in dealing with multi-terabyte datasets.
    • Comfortable managing remote resources (AWS, Heroku, Digitalocean, etc.).
    • Ability to make the right decisions in a rapidly changing environment.

    Tech stack

    Node.js, React, AWS, Postgres, Clojure, Clojurescript, Elasticsearch