Community Lead

About the role

You’ll own our relationships with users and members: the people who use OpenAlex every day, and the institutions whose support keeps it running. That means you will:

• Be a public face and voice of OpenAlex — webinars, conference talks, community calls.
• Build relationships with the institutions that support us: onboarding new members, keeping current ones happy, and growing the membership.
• Run the machinery of community: our Community Advisory Board, governance and elections, members meetings, user groups, meetups.
• Help users directly. Our support queue is shared with the tech team; answering real users’ questions is how you stay close to what the community actually needs.

What you won’t own: engineering, the back-office functions (finance, HR, taxes, legal) that stay with our CEO and COO, and sales — you’ll be involved, since you hold the relationship, but deal-making and sales paperwork aren’t yours.

This role has a clear edge to it. The mix shifts week to week. Some weeks it’s a launch webinar; some weeks it’s month six of a conversation with a member who still hasn’t decided. If that sounds chaotic, this is the wrong job. If it sounds like ownership, keep reading.

We’re not looking for someone to just schedule the webinars and keep things running smoothly. We’re looking for someone who sees a once-in-a-generation shakeup of how research works — open data, AI, the fall of the old gatekeepers — and wants to be the person lighting fires in the middle of it: a leader, an evangelist, an organizer.

About us

Inspired by the ancient Library of Alexandria, we’re building a universal research library. And by making it open to humans and machines, we’re supporting a new scientific revolution. We’d love your help.

As a nonprofit, we’re driven by mission. As a tech company, we’re working at scale: a billion API calls monthly, and millions of users across enterprise, government, and academia. Your favorite AI company probably uses OpenAlex; your favorite university definitely does.

Our small-team culture values trust, agency, and impact. The tempo’s relentless, nothing’s ever really done, and no one’s holding your hand. But the work stays interesting, we have creative autonomy, and we ship. Every day.

About you

You’re relentlessly resourceful (as pg puts it). You’ve got the smarts to outwit the impossible problems, the grit to power through the grindy ones, and the wisdom to tell the difference. You get things done. You play jazz, not classical: you’re confident in your skills, love improvising with a team, and can embrace ambiguity and imperfection in service of emergent, collaborative creativity.

You believe in our mission and you care about openness and open culture. That extends to how you communicate: with skill, empathy, and clarity.

And for this role specifically:

• You’ve spent years in the scholarly-communication world — a library, a research office, a publisher, a funder, research support. You know what the REF is, you have opinions about research evaluation, and when a librarian vents about metadata, you can vent along knowledgeably.
• You have a track record of making things happen without being asked: programs you started, events you willed into existence, communities that exist because of you.
• You’re a clear, enthusiastic, compelling writer and speaker.
• You’re comfortable when a relationship has money in it. This isn’t a sales role, but we are always hustling; paid services keep our nonprofit alive.

You don’t need a PhD (our CEO doesn’t have one), a bench-research past, or to have ever had “community” in your job title.