Join Us

We're hiring!

If you are a product manager, developer, web marketing guru, or acquisitions editor who feels passionate about our business, send a resume and tell us a bit about yourself to jobs@flatworldknowledge.com. Specific open positions are listed below.

Our beliefs about hiring are simple.

Give talented people an opportunity to build something meaningful and the tools to do it, surround them with stimulating colleagues, and give them the freedom to do their best. Finding the right people with the professionalism, maturity, and talent to deliver in that kind of environment is the hard part. We only want to work with those people. A few of our other beliefs:

We treat others as we wish to be treated. Period.

People and passion beat systems and strategy every time.

Take risks. Tom Peters wrote that companies should punish mediocre successes and reward excellent failures. We agree, though the bit about punishing might be a bit harsh. But you get the point - greatness will never be achieved by the pursuit of incremental successes.

We don’t have all the answers. Or even most of them. We expect most to come from you.

Titles don’t matter. We want people who are can improvise, playing whatever roles will help the business grow and lead to personal growth.

We are obligated to provide a challenging environment. You are obligated to challenge yourself even harder. And us.

Have an insatiable appetite for learning. We provide a stimulating educational atmosphere. Go beyond it.

A well executed average plan beats a poorly executed great plan.

Open and regular communication is vital. Both ways.

You should share in the value you create. Every employee will also be an owner.

Always maintain your sense of humor. We do. In fact, you'll need a pretty thick skin. Nobody is spared from the occasional well-aimed barb.

Open Positions

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Vice President of Marketing

We're looking for a smart, creative and experienced internet marketing professional to run a dynamic and evolving marketing organization in a truly disruptive business. You will be part of a fast-moving, entrepreneurial team looking to change an industry through a new approach to dynamic publishing of textbooks and related materials.

The Vice President of Marketing is responsible, quite simply, for driving awareness of and demand for FWK products. In our world, that means getting the word out to students and faculty members and driving awareness of and demand for our innovative digital and open source textbooks amongst faculty and students alike. We operate in an antiquated industry dominated by dinosaurs who sell the old fashioned way – with armies of salespeople who knock on doors on college campuses and buy faculty members lunch. FWK is completely disrupting the textbook industry, and thus redefining the way educational content is marketed to faculty and students. The VP Marketing will lead this effort. With faculty, that means building awareness of and confidence in our flexible, world-class content and delivery platform. For students, that means using them to spread the word that a better answer exists and then ensuring that students in courses that use FWK content access to the right materials at the right time to maximize their learning experience.

Specifically, the VP Marketing will:

  • Work with the founders on an ongoing basis to develop and refine the core FWK positioning and messaging.
  • Manage the entire customer-facing organization, which includes our Director of Marketing, our yet-to-be formally launched Customer Service/Account Management program, our Lead Generation program, and our forthcoming student campus representative program.
  • Take advantage of the incredible PR opportunities available to FWK. We are directly addressing the important, socially valuable and highly publicized problem of skyrocketing textbook costs with a business model that combines the best of open source software, democratized media, and social networking – it’s a PR dream come true.
  • Collaborate with the co-founder/CMO to drive a lead gen program that enables FWK to efficiently identify those faculty members most likely to become early adopters of and evangelists for our innovative products.
  • Define a social media strategy that will facilitate a growing wave of buzz and awareness amongst both faculty and students.
  • Develop and launch a student rep strategy to take advantage of student energy around the FWK business model, harnessing that energy to help activate faculty and administrators.
  • Develop student marketing strategies to maximize revenue per student in classes that adopt FWK content; this will depend on creation of effective marketing materials and messaging, properly merchandising the FWK website, and working with faculty adopters to educate their students as to the various FWK offerings.
  • Establish an industry leading Customer Service and Account Management operation to serve both faculty and students.
  • Be an expert with respect to the competition.

In the near term, we also expect this person to spend as much as 1/3 of his/her time performing a Product Management role for Flat World Knowledge. This Product Management role includes “owning” the website experience for all Flat World Knowledge customers. In this role, this person will:

  • Perform consistent usability analysis for the site;
  • Ensure the “self service” demands of the site are being met;
  • Segment leads for appropriate follow-up by other FWK team members;
  • Integrate live support into the website;
  • Oversee daily analytics to determine dynamic changes and opportunities;
  • Other general product management roles.

It is expected that this Product Management role will eventually be managed by a Product Manager who reports to the VP Marketing, but in the near term the VP Marketing will define and manage these responsibilities directly.

Qualifications

  • Minimum of 5 years experience in online marketing;
  • Demonstrated success defining and launching exceptional products;
  • Stellar written and verbal communication skills;
  • Strong knowledge of latest in web design, usability & analytics;
  • Excellent teamwork skills;
  • Thrive on ambiguity and managing complexity;
  • Strong technical abilities and understanding of internet technologies such as online communities (needed) and open source development (a plus);
  • Solid analytical and communication skills;
  • Flexible, hands on, roll up the sleeves and do whatever it takes approach
  • A well developed sense of humor.

We're looking for someone ready for that next big challenge. Someone who wants to help build a dynamic team and help define the image, profile, and ultimate success for a disruptive and socially important company.

This position is located in Nyack, NY, about 20 miles north of New York City. You must be able to be in the HQ office at least four (4) days a week.

To apply please send resume to jobs@flatworldknowledge.com

Senior Solutions Architect/Developer

Role

Flat World Knowledge is looking for a Senior Web Architect and Developer with a combination of strong PHP / Ruby / SQL, XML, software design principles, and hands-on architectural / framework expertise, management experience as well as knowledge of XHTML, CSS and Javascript. You will work across the entire technology stack and be fully responsible for what you build. You will write elegant, maintainable, scalable code every day. The ideal candidate will be enthusiastic and innovative, good at "getting things done", and have a passion for what we do. You will help build a cutting edge open textbook publishing platform.

Deliverables and Responsibilities

  • Designing and implementing core software components for new Flat World Knowledge website features using open-source technologies.
  • Supporting production applications and architecture
  • Improving our internal tools, frameworks, and development practices
  • Ensuring software delivered by the team is of requisite quality

Skills and Experience

  • 7+ years experience
  • An intimate familiarity with at least one web development framework (Rails, Django, CakePHP, Drupal, etc)
  • Experience with XHTML, CSS and Javascript
  • Independent problem solving skills, ability to write code that scales
  • Understanding of how the web works, from low to high levels
  • Familiarity with a wide range of relevant technologies and web standards
  • Flexibility: we are small company, but we move quickly

Desirable

  • Expert knowledge of Agile engineering practices (or similar) including Test Driven Development
  • DocBook XML, XSL
  • Experience with publishing technologies
  • Drupal, Subversion, MySQL
  • Web services
  • Linux CLI

Education and Qualifications

  • BS level education in relevant discipline or equivalent experience

Behaviors & Personality

  • Willingness to commit to a goal
  • Obscene level of productivity
  • Ability to focus on job in hand
  • Openness and clarity in communication
  • Detail-oriented, methodical, a perfectionist and work well with others
  • Strong leadership
  • Ability to work well in a collaborative team environment
  • Desire and drive to deliver
  • Passionate about Open Education

This position is located in both New York City, NY and Nyack/Westchester, NY.

To apply please send resume to tech-jobs@flatworldknowledge.com

Agile Product Owner (Technical Project Manager)

We're looking for a smart, creative and experienced Agile Product Owner / Business Analyst / Product Management Guru to help develop our dynamic publishing platform. You will be part of a fast-moving technology team looking to change an industry through a new approach to dynamic publishing products. This person sits within engineering, and is responsible for the product planning and iterations throughout the product life cycle, including: gathering and prioritizing User stories / requirements, fleshing them out for development, and working closely with engineering, production, sales, marketing and support to ensure features are built and tested accordingly.

We envision this person to:

  • Evangelize products internally and externally. You are a true spokesperson for the product, knowing its every feature and piece of functionality inside and out. You adopt the product line as if they were your own sibling/offspring.
  • Contribute heavily to overall product vision, future direction, and execution roadmap
  • Ensure that our website experience is appropriately modern and always evolving
  • Work with external third parties to assess partnerships and opportunities
  • Constantly interact with customer users, including running beta programs with early-stage products, feedback sessions, etc.
  • Be an expert with respect to the competition

Qualifications

  • Minimum of 4-5 years experience in online Product Management (experience building large-scale, web-based consumer sites is a huge plus)
  • Demonstrated success defining and launching excellent products
  • Stellar written and verbal communication skills
  • Strong knowledge of latest in web design, usability & analytics, (experience with Agile development with respect to product management a plus)
  • Bachelor's degree (MBA preferred)
  • Excellent teamwork skills
  • Thrive on ambiguity and managing complexity
  • Strong technical abilities (you can do things like write hackish SQL or scripts in PHP) and basic understanding of internet technologies such as online communities and open source development
  • Solid analytical and communication skills
  • Understanding of higher education student and professor market a huge plus
  • Experience in the publishing space a huge plus
  • A well developed sense of humor

This position is located in both New York City and Nyack, NY, about 20 miles north of New York City. Contact us for more details.

To apply please send resume to tech-jobs@flatworldknowledge.com