USA TODAY Sports

At USA TODAY Sports, we aim to build next generation products and platforms that put fans at the center of the conversation by using open source software and focusing on user experience.

Founded 1982
  • News, Media, Advertising, & Publishing
  • Headquarters address
    6060 Center Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90045, USA

    Who we are

    We're USA Today Sports Media Group, a division of USA TODAY tasked with building next-gen publishing platforms for sports fans. Using WordPress as our foundation, we build massively-scalable products that serve tens of millions of sports fans every month.

    Our team is small. We pride ourselves on providing a startup feel, with big-business backing. You'll be working alongside a handful of talented, passionate WordPress experts who are committed to writing elegant code with an eye to user experience.

    Development FTW!

    Our work

    For The Win - Our flagship social sports site, For The Win, serves over 10 million sports fans their daily dose of entertaining sports content. The size of the audience allows us to test, iterate and deploy constantly, with instant feedback. This has encouraged us to redesign the site three times in its short two-year life, to great success.

    MMAjunkie - This best place online for MMA news and analysis, especially on fight night. Fight night spikes test the limits of our scalability and keep us on our toes.

    Ad Meter - Ad Meter is the place to watch Super Bowl commercials during the big game. Each year, thousands of visitors vote for their favorites, with the results published on the front page of USA TODAY the next day. This is the kind of tentpole project that tests the limits of our collaboration abilities and demonstrates our small team's ability to be nimble and deliver on tight deadlines for big value.

    Ad Meter FTW!

    Our group manages more than 20 sports properties.

    Who we're looking for

    Let's face it, publishing is at a crossroads in history. The decisions we make now will have profound effects on the future of how all people receive their news. With the speed our small team can move at, we're making those decisions day in and day out.

    We want to find other people who are excited to make those decisions with us and put the ideas into action.

    The people best equipped to turn ideas into code at our company will be experts in PHP and have extensive experience with WordPress. Contributors to WordPress core and authors of plugins would make exceptional candidates. As news, and especially sports news, becomes more visual, an eye to user experience is a must.

    Come write some code!

    How we hire

    We're committed to finding the right people who want to work at our company, and want to work with each other. Thus, our hiring standards are high. We're talking about the future of publishing here!

    We think the right candidates will enjoy the process, and those who make it to offer will know that we take finding the right team members seriously, to everyone's benefit.

    Interview stages:

    1. Intro interview with hiring manager - we just want to say hello, and understand where you're looking to take your career.
    2. Interview with VP of engineering or senior developer - we want to understand team fit, make sure you're comfortable with your future peers.
    3. Technical interview - generally a white-board logic problem (in person or Google Hangout), the most fun and challenging part of the process.

    The office & team

    Our team spans the country, with offices in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, New York and DC. This position is located in Los Angeles, at the Howard Hughes Center near Playa Vista and LAX, where we're looking to build up a new arm of our engineering team. You will be working mostly with our senior WordPress developer in New York initially, while we work to find the right people locally. Our intention is to staff LA with a product manager, two developers and a QA in the near term.

    Tech stack

    PHP, MySQL, jQuery, WordPress, WordPress VIP

    Benefits

    Compensation and retirement

    401k plan

    Health and wellness

    Insurance (Health)
    Insurance (Dental)
    Insurance (Vision)