Web Developer Job at Sports Reference

Posted: June 4, 2018

POSITION: Web Developer

LOCATION: Philadelphia/Interwebz

REPORTS TO: Sean Forman, SR President

JOB SUMMARY

Sports Reference LLC is searching for one or more web developers to join our current group of 9 employees for work on our group of sites: Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, Pro-Football-Reference.com, Hockey-Reference.com, College Football, College Basketball, FBref (soccer), and our StatHead.com project.

You'll be joining three other full-time web developers currently on staff.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS (In rough order of importance)

• Maintain, design and develop one or more of Sports Reference's existing websites.
• Maintain relevant content and data as season calendar progresses from preparing for the upcoming season to wrapping up postseason awards.
• Normalize and verify data for entry into databases.
• Create new and expanded web applications for Sports Reference sites.
• Contribute to company discussions relating to new ideas, features or problems to be solved.
• Complete special projects related to company objectives as time and skills allow.

QUALIFICATIONS and SKILLS

A qualified candidate will satisfy the following:

• have a command of written and spoken English,
• have top notch programming skills (and have an interest in learning new languages),
• know HTML,
• have a working knowledge of CSS, JS, SQL, and database-backed website design,
• have a history of getting things done (and done well), and
• enjoy sports.
• No degree is required, though we would likely view a Bachelor’s degree as some evidence of the ability to get things done.

A highly qualified candidate will be able to contribute with knowledge in some of the following:

• knowledge of club and international football,
• deep knowledge of a sport we currently cover,
• perl,
• responsive design,
• javascript development,
• DevOps,
• QA/testing,
• database tuning,
• advanced css technique,
• web site performance,
• search engine optimization,
• web analytics,
• fluency in a foreign language, and
• sabermetrics, apbrmetrics, puckmetrics, soccermetrics or pframetrics.

OTHER INFORMATION

• Sports Reference is located in Philadelphia and due to the nature of this work preference will be given to candidates able to work in Philadelphia, but non-Philadelphia candidates will be considered. Please indicate in your cover letter if you are able to work out of our Philadelphia office.
• This is a full-time job as a web developer.
• Applicant is preferred to have a legal right to work in the United States. We'd have to look carefully at other cases.

Sports Reference is a small company with 9 employees, so your work will be highly visible and have a definite and immediate impact. Even though we are a small company, Sports Reference covers the full cost of employee health and dental insurance, life and disability insurance, and provides a 3% match for retirement accounts. We believe our salaries are competitive, and we attempt to offer salaries commensurate with your ability level and experience.

We also strive to be a workplace with a healthy work-life balance. You are expected to work no more than 40 hours per week. We are flexible with work from home time and provide generous vacation time as well.

Despite being small, Sports Reference (now 18 years old) has an outsized impact as we serve over 12 million users per month including franchise and league staff, Halls of Fame, and members of the media. Our stack is a bit old-school as we use CentOS, Nginx/Apache, MySQL, Perl, and we also write all of our own JS and CSS. We even have real, physical servers. Where we are cutting edge is in our commitment to our users and to answering as many of their questions as we can as easily and reliably as we can.

We have also had alumni go on to work at multiple Major League teams, 538, the NBA, and also write for the Boston Globe, New York Times and prominent outlets.

We will begin reviewing applicants June 18th and will continue until the position is filled. To apply, please send a cover e-mail to bugs_3@sports-reference.com (our bug system) and attach an up-to-date resume in .pdf (preferred), .doc, or .txt form. Please use the subject "Web Developer - Your Name". Questions regarding the position may be sent to the same address above. References may be requested as we advance through the process.

Sports Reference LLC does not discriminate in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, religion, military service eligibility, veteran status, marital status, disability, membership in any other protected classes, or on the basis of sports franchise preferences.