Community Manager at Stack Overflow (Greater NYC Area, NY)
At its core, Stack Overflow is made up of the communities who create the content on our sites and help solve each other’s problems. From our flagship technical site to our more niche communities for chefs and hikers and worldbuilders, our communities really are what we’re all about. If they are healthy and they grow, so do we.
Our community managers are the primary caretakers of those communities. They support and nurture existing communities, learn what those communities need in order to grow and thrive, and identify what new policies and features will help our network get stronger.
What you'll do
- Help invent new (and refine existing) ways to build and strengthen communities, turning site-by-site learning into holistic, network-wide processes
- Mentor communities built around topics ranging from math to cooking (many will be foreign to you)
- Review community activities and answer technical, interpersonal, and/or moderation-based questions
- Mediate conflicts between parties who might never agree with one another, but who share the common goal of building informative Q&A communities
- Handle escalated moderator and user issues that arise on the sites
- Identify and develop leaders and evangelists in communities who can help their sites flourish, and mentor those users so sites need you less
- Research the factors that drive site success in order to understand what’s needed to help sites grow
- Write blog and meta posts to help communicate our goals and the reasoning behind changes and features
- Analyze the rules and policies that drive our community-building engine and work with developers and product managers to ensure the software supports those policies
- Identify ways to automate and streamline processes related to community support, moderation, and monitoring site health
Skills & Requirements
- Fluency in written and spoken English is required. Proficiency in written Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, or Spanish would be a plus
- An active Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange profile is nice, but what we’re really looking for is meaningful experience building any kind of online community - it does not need to be on Stack Exchange sites
- Self-motivated, with ability to get stuff done with little supervision – yes, everyone says that, but it’s crucial for distributed, evolving teams
- Enthusiastic, energetic, outgoing and positive (even in the face of hostility or negativity)
- Extremely strong communication skills, with the ability to write clearly and compellingly on both self-identified and assigned topics
- Mastery of diplomacy and persuasion skills (with a little amateur behavioral psychology thrown in for good measure)
- Ability to express disagreement clearly while making sure to engage in interpersonal conflict safely and respectfully
- Some aptitude and interest in areas such as psychology, political science, economics, sociology, or the humanities in general
- Comfort with analytics and process – community management can be hands-on and touchy-feely, but we need our model to scale, too
Also note:
- We don’t consider applications without cover letters - please make sure to include yours, and make sure to tell us what about Stack Overflow (and not just the role) interests you in working here. We promise - we read every single one.
What you’ll get in return:
- Flexible hours
- 20 days paid vacation + holidays
- Completely free health insurance - no copay, no premiums (US residents)
- Generous parental leave (10-16 weeks at 100% pay), family care leave, and unlimited sick days
- Employees will never be poked with a sharp stick
If you want to work remotely…. We’ll help you set up a great home office, with an ergonomic chair, standing desk, and any other equipment you need to do your job.
If you want to work in our office… You’ll get your own private office in our headquarters in New York City, and enjoy additional benefits like free lunch every day prepared by our own in-house chefs, transportation reimbursement, and all the espresso you can drink.
About Stack OverflowStack Overflow is the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. More than 50 million professional and aspiring programmers visit Stack Overflow each month to help solve coding problems, develop new skills, and find job opportunities.
We partner with businesses to help them understand, hire, engage, and enable the world's developers. Our products and services are focused on developer marketing, technical recruiting, market research, and enterprise knowledge sharing.
We believe in hiring smart people and getting out of their way. We have an office in New York with some of the best amenities of any New York startup, and we have people who work remotely all over the world. We keep meetings and ceremony to an absolute minimum.
What we value:
- Servant Leadership: We lead by empowering and inspiring people to do their best work, not by micromanaging. We hire smart people, set them up for success, then get out of their way.
- Collaboration: The best products are created when people from different backgrounds and disciplines work closely together in an environment of respect and trust.
- Transparency: Trust is built on openness and transparency. If there is not a good reason to keep it a secret, we share it. For example, we share our complete engineering salary formula.
- Inclusion: We do our best work when we can be our whole selves at work. We’re committed to policies and benefits that support people, and leaders who foster an open and inclusive culture.
Diverse teams build better products.
Legally, we need you to know this:
Stack Exchange, Inc. does not discriminate in employment matters on the basis of race, color, religion, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, military service eligibility, veteran status, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, or any other protected class. We support workplace diversity.
But we want to add this:
We strongly believe that diversity contributes to a broader collective perspective that will consistently lead to a better company and better products. We are working hard to increase the diversity of our team wherever we can and we actively encourage everyone to consider becoming a part of it.
