About us

Outside.in is the best place to discover news happening around you. We make it easy to find stories, events, and local discussions happening in your neighborhood, within your city, or even on your block. Thousands of sources—including local bloggers, newspapers, events databases, and even Twitter tweets—help you keep up with everything happening in your backyard.

How do we do it? We aggregate all the news, discussions, and conversations on the web and map it to specific locations. We then organize that content by every city, state, zip code, neighborhood, street address, latitude/longitude, and discrete place. Organizing the web this way enables amazing applications for consumers, publishers, and advertisers.

• Personalized news: Find out what's happening right around you! Search for news in your neighborhood, town, or city—or within 1,000 feet of your address—from our homepage.
• StoryMaps for bloggers: Outside.in's StoryMaps automatically geotag, organize, and promote your content. Learn more about StoryMaps.
• Outside.in for Publishers: We help local publishers big and small create customized Neighborhood News Pages for every neighborhood in their market. Licensed and free ad-supported versions available.

Outside.in technology powers hyperlocal news with media partners and bloggers in every market in the United States. Thousands of bloggers use GeoToolkit and StoryMaps to promote and organize their local content. The outside.in network now reaches more than 4 million monthly unique visitors. And we're just getting started!

We are based in Brooklyn and are supported by a great team of investors including Union Square Ventures, New York City Investment Fund, Betaworks, and Milestone Venture Partners,

If you want to know more, check out our blog, follow us on Twitter, be a fan on Facebook, read our forums, or just ask.

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Outside.in is a young, dynamic company changing the face of local. We're always looking to add great people to our team. We offer highly competitive packages with excellent benefits. Our offices are based in Brooklyn, New York. If you are interested in working at outside.in, please get in touch.

• Software Engineers: Ruby, Scala, Geo, NLP, Ad Serving & Optimization
• Content Analyst
• Community Manager
• Vice President of Product Development
• QA Lead

Software Engineers: Ruby, Scala, Geo, NLP, Ad Serving & Optimization

Outside.in is the service for finding out what’s going on in your neighborhood, or wherever you happen to be. We provide our users and publishing partners with with innovative tools to discover the news, people, places and conversations in their communities. Our platform is the leader in aggregation and delivery of localized content for consumers and publications. We are building the future of local media.

We have top tier investors and are experiencing major growth. The tech team is small, quirky (in a good way) and deeply talented. We seek experienced candidates with at least 4 years experience and startup chops to join our engineering group, to drive innovation and help ship the next generation of Outside.in applications. The next superstar Software Engineers who join us will build groundbreaking local media content and advertising products and scale them massively.

Our stack includes Ruby, Scala, C++, Javascript, Rails, Sinatra, Solr/Lucene, message queueing, and Postgres/PostGIS. We build mobile apps (iPhone, Android), Web apps, and API's. We're agile where it makes sense, but mostly sensible, intelligent, clever and hard-working. We prefer generalists who have lots of successes committing at every layer of the stack.

We are a tiny but mighty team. We have a hands-on management team full of startup DNA that knows how to build value for our team and shareholders.

Your Qualifications:

• A minimum of 6 years applicable software engineering, with a trail of outstanding references from peers.
• Ambitious, driven, and talented individual who wants to work on hard, game-changing problems
• Team player who feels at home in a flat-structured, highy collaborative environment. You can lead, mentor, and contribute without pretense.
• Write well-structured, easily maintainable, well-documented code. Be able to show us some samples you're proud of.
• At least 2 years of Ruby, and real experience with typed languages, in order of preference: Java/Scala/Clojure, C/C++, C#
• Strong knowledge of Ruby on Rails
• Excited to learn and evaluate new tools and languages (Clojure, Scala, Hadoop, Hypertable)
• Comfortable using Git for version control
• Solid SQL skills, preferable with Postgres 8.x
• Knowledge of search frameworks such as Sphinx and Lucene
• Fully proficient in Linux environment
• Familiarity with Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, EBS, etc.) preferred
• Familiarity with geometry and mapping highly desirable
• Love of well-designed API's. Be able to talk about your favorites and why they are great.
• Demonstrable track record building distributed, clustered, high-throughput applications
• Be able to balance beauty and pragmatism in your designs and code! Prove it with sample projects.
• Minimally a BA/BS in CS or related field

Your Areas of Interest:

We want you to have one or more of the following areas of interest and real-world experience:

• Geo: Geographic data, geometric containment and mapping API's
• NLP: Passion for text analysis and semantic extraction, with a particular eye towards balancing accuracy and throughput
• Ad Serving, Monetization, Optimization and Exchanges: OpenX, DFP, Google Ad Manager, RightMedia, etc... revenue performance metrics and A/B monetization strategies

What You Would Do Here:

• Architect, build, test and refine new Outside.in products and services
• Develop and expand infrastructure to process many millions of page views and transactions with fault-tolerance and predictability
• Tackle a wide variety of coding problems throughout the stack. We are a small team and we work on everything.
• Brainstorm and prototype new concepts and approaches fast. Turn prototypes into real things.
• Help continuously improve our development environment by proposing new approaches, tools, and automating brainless tasks
• Help troubleshoot and maintain production and testing environments. Contribute to diagnosing and solving performance issues whenever the occur

What We Offer:

• A driven, motivated, and talented team that believes in working hard and reaping the rewards
• High-energy, transparent work environment with brilliant people and a great opportunity to learn, grow and succeed.
• Exciting opportunities to realize the vision on "Outside.in everywhere" - we are changing local media and advertising for the better!
• Laid-back office environment
• Competitive compensation and excellent benefits

If you are qualified and a good communicator, we want to meet you. Submit your resume as text or PDF to jobs@outside.in, along with your cover note.

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Content Analyst

The Outside.in Content Analyst owns responsibility for tracking, reporting, and optimizing the metrics associated with the content we aggregate, the tags and metadata we add and the direct traffic and revenue generated from such.

The ideal candidate will have very strong quantitative and analytical skills, a deep love for diving into data to find answers and possesses strong technical acumen. Advanced Excel skills and experience with Google Analytics, Quantcast, or similar tools are hugely helpful.

Responsibilities include:

• Monitor, analyze, report and optimize daily overall content metrics, including identifying the most valuable sources and types of content as well as pages and regions.
• Monitor autotagging engines. Identify top performing tags and optimize metrics.
• Support content acquisition efforts of our growing list of media partners.
• Work closely with revenue and product teams to tie monetization data to content data and optimize.

Potential candidates should have 1-3 years of experience, either as a media planner, product manager, content, marketing or financial analyst at a media company or financial institution. Any role that included search engine optimization and marketing is a plus.

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Community Manager

The Outside.in Community Manager is the company’s dedicated liaison to local bloggers across the country and is primarily responsible for the development of a loyal, active and engaged community.

The Community Manger will be passionate about local bloggers, and dedicated to their success and to Outside.in's mission to help grow their business. Outstanding written and verbal skills are a must, as is the ability to create a plan, act quickly, track results and quickly adapt.

The position reports to the Director of Partner Relations.

Responsibilities include:

• Maintain Outside.in's blog and other public channels; ensuring that they become effective two-way tools for communication
• Author blog posts, articles, tweets, podcasts or other ways to communicate the benefits of Outside.in and use of Outside.in to our customers.
• Create a vibrant community of customers through education, outreach, events and other customer engagement strategies.
• Foster a sense of community around our brand at the product and corporate level
• Grow Geotoolkit’s user base, including but not limited to creating and executing plans to increase the number of users
• Research and provide input, as a representative of the blogging community, in the development of Outside.in for Bloggers products
• Monitor key online conversations and events to make sure Outside.in is participating effectively & is being represented.
• Respond to user comments, questions, and requests regarding both GeoToolkit and Outside.in’s core site
• Learn our products inside and out and be able to drive users' questions and issues to resolution
• Potential candidates could have backgrounds in marketing, community management, audience engagement, blogging, or journalism. The ideal candidate will already be immersed in social media and online communities and have a robust online profile for our review. Having created a Twitter account with thousands of followers is a plus!

Please send us a link to your online presence as your application to jobs@outside.in.

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Vice President of Product Development

Outside.in is looking for a dynamic individual to lead our Product Development. He or she will help make sure our collective vision for the future of local media is executed flawlessly.

Specific responsibilities include working with the team to build and refine our overall product roadmap and scope the features, functionality, competitive positioning and performance of all of our products.

The ideal candidate should be a proven leader and have prior success at a revenue-focused online media company. He/she should have experience running a product organization that includes new product development, project management, research, graphic and UI design. Experience with local media and the geo-web is a definite plus.

This is a hands-on job that requires deep knowledge and demonstrable industry-leading experience with all facets of online publishing, media and software, including:

• All types of online advertising, including national and local search and display
• Different types of ad pricing (i.e. CPM, CPC, CPA) and targeting (i.e. geo, behavioral, contextual, retargeting, etc..)
• Performance and conversion optimization
• Ad servers (i.e. DFP, OpenX, etc..)
• Ad networks and exchanges
• XML feed aggregation
• Content aggregation and syndication
• Consumer media destination businesses
• Semantic algorithms and NLP
• Search engine optimization
• Analytics and reporting
• UX and usability
• Development methodologies and Software Project Management

Additional Requirements:

• College degree (MBA preferred) or equivalent experience
• Minimum 10 years online media experience
• Strong management skills
• A strong network of fellow industry leaders
• Superior interpersonal communication skills
• Insatiable desire for "what's next" in media

Outside.in is a fast-paced, high-growth company and value innovation, speed, quality and results. We look for people who share those values.

Please send a link to your updated LinkedIn profile to careers@outside.in.

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QA Lead

Outside.in is building the new platform for local media. We tell millions of users each month what's happening, where they are, right now. We partner with thousands of sites and provide them with innovative tools to discover the news, people, places, and conversations in their communities.

We have top tier investors and are experiencing major growth. The tech team is small, quirky (in a good way), and deeply talented. We seek an experienced QA professional with at least 4 years experience and startup chops to join our engineering group, to drive automation, quality, and help ship the next generation of Outside.in applications. The QA Engineer who join us will test groundbreaking local media applications and advertising products and help scale them massively.

Our stack includes Ruby, Scala, C++, Javascript, Rails, Sinatra, Solr/Lucene, message queueing, and Postgres/PostGIS. We build mobile apps (iPhone, Android), web apps, and APIs. We're agile where it makes sense, but mostly sensible, intelligent, clever, and hard-working. Testing is core to all of our eforts, and we take a lot of pride in the quality we ship. We are a tiny but mighty team. We have a hands-on management team full of startup DNA that knows how to build value for our team and shareholders.

Role Summary:

Hands-on manager of QA processes, metrics, and systems for testing a massively scalable software application. Responsible for the design, development, implementation, and management of quality assurance throughout Outside.in.

Responsibilities:

• Develop and manage quality assurance standards, metrics, and processes to ensure shipping killer products
• Create and manage multiple test environments for testing functionality, scalability, and deployment
• Develop, implement, and manage manual and automated test plans, test cases, test scripts, and test suites
• Perform both front-end web-based functional testing and back-end testing, including service testing
• Research and develop new testing methods or automated tools to improve the testing cycle and process
• Lead teams of internal and outsourced testers from functional through acceptance testing
• Manage the full bug-tracking cycle: Track defects and fixes and assess regression impacts with the engineering team. Work directly with end users and customers to resolve issues.
• Manage and implement full-cycle testing: Create and document test plans and test strategies, direct testing efforts, and track metrics across releases.

Qualifications:

• BS in Computer Science or related field
• 4+ years experience testing software, especially web application, preferably in a leadership role
• Expert knowledge and experience in software QA (including performance, availability, and functional testing)
• Demonstrable experience in QA automation
• Proficient in shell scripting and/or scripting languages such as Ruby or Perl
• Clear understanding of web frameworks and internet technologies
• Experience testing web services for functionality, load, and scalability
• Solid working knowledge of Unix/Linux
• Clear understanding of product release cycles, code repositories, branching, tagging, and packaging. Experience with Git preferred.
• Experience with bug tracking and management software. Experience with JIRA preferred.
• Excellent analytical skills
• Excellent oral and written communication skills
• Highly motivated, able to excel in both team and independent work environments
• Extraordinary attention to detail
• Strong team leadership ability

What We Offer:

• A driven, motivated, and talented team that believes in working hard and reaping the rewards.
• High-energy, transparent work environment with brilliant people and a great opportunity to learn, grow and succeed.
• Exciting opportunities to realize the vision on "Outside.in everywhere." We are changing local media and advertising for the better!
• Laid-back office environment.
• Competitive compensation and excellent benefits.

If you are qualified and a good communicator, we want to meet you. Submit your resume as text or PDF to jobs@outside.in, along with your cover note explaining what interests you about this opportunity and why you are the QA leader we are seeking.

20 Jay Street, Suite 1019
Brooklyn, NY 11201
718.801.8555

Partner with Us

Outside.in for Publishers helps local publishers big and small create customized Neighborhood News Pages for every neighborhood in their market. Licensed and free ad-supported versions available.

Contact us at publishers@outside.in for more information or get started at publishers.outside.in.

Advertise with Us

Outside.in gives advertisers access to the local audiences in every neighborhood in the United States. We are growing fast and adding new sites to our network every day. Contact us at sales@outside.in for more information on how to reach our hyperlocal audience.

Find Any Bugs?

Submit bugs, feature requests, and issues at outside.in/help. You might want to check our user forums first to see if we've already addressed your question or issue.

Comments or Suggestions

For questions about our site, read our FAQ. Do you have questions about StoryMaps? We've got answers in our GeoToolkit FAQ. Have more questions or suggestions? We'd love to hear from you hear from you.

Press Inquiries

Media and analysts should contact press@outside.in.

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