The Daily Beast

The Daily Beast delivers award-winning original reporting and sharp opinion from big personalities in politics, pop culture, world news and more. Fiercely independent, our stories are infused with irreverent intelligence. We are an IAC company (NASDAQ: IACI) located in IAC Headquarters in Chelsea, NYC.

We are migrating our website from being rendered within our CMS to a new and separate JavaScript-based stack that takes JSON supplied by our CMS, serves pages through Node.js and renders using React.js.

Team and Culture

The Daily Beast is an informal and focused environment. The urgency of a newsroom with a commitment to sustainable pace and a commitment to encouraging personal interests, fitness and time away from work. The technology team is small, collaborative, intelligent and enthusiastic. We value continuous improvement and learning through retrospection, experiementation and access to outside resources. Our CTO and product team are committed to testing as a means to validating assumptions about features, building with quality, and communicating expectations. A major goal of senior leadership and the CTO is to allow technologists to contribute to the strategic direction of the website, app and affiliated products. IAC is a mix small and large independent startups supported by large corporate resources. IAC provides formal and informal opportunities to mingle with staff in the other companies.

Workflow and Process

Our goal with our JavaScript based server and client-side website is to extensively test and predictably deploy on a one week iteration cycle using Extreme Programming (XP) engineering practices including: pair programming, onsite customer, test driven development, collective ownership and refactoring. We follow Scrum project management practices with fixed one week iterations, retrospection, daily stand ups, burn down tracking, backlog planning and grooming with our product team on a regular cycle. We emphasize work/life balance, sustainable pace in a collegial environment. We aspire to a culture that values collaboration on both product features and feature development. We work in coordination with an offshore team of Java and Javascript developers who manage changes to our CMS. We have both onsite and offshore QA resources and QA participates in planning, scoping and execution of work in the backlog. Our CTO is an experienced Agile practitioner/coach dedicated to supporting high performing teams.

Hours and Schedule

Office hours are from 9:30 to 6pm. We work onsite with occasional remote work from home as needed. We have standard holidays. Vacations are pre-arranged with direct managers with no set limit on vacation days. IAC has all-company dog days.

Office Space

The office is bright and open with views of the Hudson River. Developers sit facing each other adjacent to product, design, UX, and web analytics groups and near the reporters and editors. There are conference rooms and informal couches and tables for meetings and quite time throughout the building. Each floor has a fully stocked snack bar and IAC provides a shared kitchen/cafe space for meals. IAC offers a weekly breakfast, monthly happy hours and seasonal social events. IAC Headquarters is Frank Gehry's first major glass building with a sweeping sailboat-like design located between the highline and Chelsea piers.