Senior Rails Developer / Engineering Lead

Yardbarker (www.yardbarker.com) is a San Francisco-based company that is revolutionizing online sports media with its rapidly growing network of 700+ sports publishers, dozens of celebrity athlete bloggers (like Donovan McNabb, Santonio Holmes, Rajon Rondo, Gina Carano, etc.), and a community of the most passionate sports fans on the planet. We are growing quickly, our investors are very supportive, we work with some of the biggest brand advertisers on the planet, and we've just partnered with FoxSports.com and MSN to bring our content to a larger audience.

We have a small, but very experienced team, and we are looking to add one very talented Rails Developer to help us grow to the next level. If you're the ideal candidate, you:

• Love to solve problems, and love to write elegant and pragmatic code. You know when it's appropriate to build a sophisticated general-purpose architecture, and you know when to let go of perfectionism... and create a quick hack to solve the problem at hand. You feel that software is a means to an end, rather than the end itself... and yet, great code just keeps flowing out of you!
• Have a broad skill-set, including Ruby on Rails, MySQL, CSS, HTML/XHTML, and Javascript (including libraries such as Prototype and Scriptaculous). Although you may have particular strengths, you're comfortable working throughout the stack, and doing whatever it takes to drive a project to completion.
• Have worked on a large-scale web property, and have successfully dealt with performance, optimization and scaling issues. You consider scalability whenever writing new code, and you are extremely comfortable writing custom SQL to work around Rails or MySQL limitations.
• Have worked in a start-up before, and are excited about the opportunity to roll up your sleeves and build something great (especially something great that will be seen by millions of sports fans)!
• Have excellent communication, presentation, and writing skills. When working with other engineers, you are precise and insightful. When working with non-engineers, you are patient and collaborative... not because it's part of your job description, but because you believe that the best products are built by small, cross-disciplinary teams.
• Are highly self-motivated. You're excited to work hard, because it means that you're going to be able to take pride in what you've accomplished. When necessary, you can be highly productive on your own, but you especially enjoy the camaraderie that arises from working together as a team.
• Are pragmatic when it comes to process. You are not attached to any particular software development methodology (extreme, TDD, agile, scrum, waterfall, etc.). You may have personal favorites, but you're comfortable working in a variety of systems. Your preference is for just-enough structure: enough form to facilitate communication and collaboration, and enough openness to allow something new and unexpected to emerge.

• You're a sports fan

East Coast Sales Manager

What's Yardbarker?

You know that friend of yours who always knows more than everyone else about what's going on in sports? Not just who won last night, but which athletes are dating which models. He wins every argument, he's full of pop cultural references, and he's pretty funny. THAT'S Yardbarker. We publish sports blogs written by passionate fans and professional athletes, including superstars like Donovan McNabb, Greg Oden, Rajon Rondo, and Chris Cooley. We reach 10mm unique users per month. We distribute our content through a partnership with FoxSports.com. And we pay the bills by working with brand advertisers like Coors Light, Gillette, EA Sports, and Dish Network to create custom brand campaigns that translate a brand's message into the language that resonates best with our audience. We're a growing and influential media property, and we need the right kind of sales person to represent us.

The Job:

We're looking for a CREATIVE, tenacious, results-driven advertising sales professional to manage East Coast sales for Yardbarker. The perfect candidate has 1-5 years of online ad sales experience, successfully closing business with the top agencies and clients in the New York market and beyond. You will be working independently from a home office (ideally in Manhattan), but collaborating closely with the sales team and CEO in San Francisco, and traveling quite a bit. You will:

• Proactively identify, qualify, pitch, and close business with top interactive agencies as well as smaller direct clients
• Pursue business based on existing relationships and constantly develop new ones
• Set up pitch meetings on the East Coast for our San Francisco-based Sales Director and CEO
• Develop and maintain a strong pipeline that grows stronger over time
• Work with SF-based team to develop customized pitches and media plans
• Hit an aggressive but reasonable quarterly revenue quota
• Funnel customer feedback back through the Yardbarker organization in order to continuously improve our offering to advertisers

• 1-5 years experience in online advertising sales (actually selling)
• A portfolio of success stories that you are proud of from your previous sales position(s)
• An ability to work independently while constantly communicating via IM, email, and phone, and traveling as often as necessary
• Relentless, creative persistence. You pride yourself on coming up with great ways to follow up
• Professionalism, a passion for new media, and an interest in sports
• A sense of humor that your friends would say is above average, at least

• Base salary with significant commission package
• Stock options
• Medical/dental benefits
• PTO, paid holidays