Come Work with Us

Whether your passion is French cuisine, family and parenting, or social technology, you can find the latest news and information - from mainstream media and bloggers - on Topix.

Topix crawls and categorizes breaking news from over 50,000 news sources, 24 hours a day. Our technology reads every story as it is released and then categorizes each one into one or more of the more than 360,000 news pages.

Currently, Topix has separate pages for the 30,000 US cities and towns, 5,500 public company and industry verticals, 48,000 celebrities and musicians, 1,500 sports teams and personalities, and many, many more.

But Topix does more than tell you what's happening in the world. Through our easy-to-use publishing system with a built in audience of millions, we're handing a bullhorn to anyone who wants to voice their opinion.

We're expanding the concept of news to include blogs, comments, and forums. We're breathing life into local news, turning passive news into active dialogue.

To learn more about Topix, check out our blog, and peruse our open positions. If you like what you see, please send your resume and cover letter to recruiter@topix.com with the position name as the subject line.

Current Open Positions

• Two positions available for Regional Sales Manager, East Coast & West Coast
• Community Manager
• Sr. Software Engineer
• Web/Perl Software Engineer

Sales

Two positions available for Regional Sales Manager, East Coast & West Coast

Opportunity

These positions will bear responsibility for providing strategic advertising sales for Topix.com from designated East and West Coast territories, including driving advertising sales for its primary Website ( www.topix.com ). The person(s) seeking to fill this role should be passionate and knowledgeable about new and emerging internet-based media in a Web 2.0 world. At the same time, the individual filling this role must be a highly motivated "can-do" individual capable of rolling up the proverbial sleeves in order to get the job done. The Regional Sales Managers report into the VP of Sales in San Francisco.

Responsibilities

• Develop an opportunity pipeline to meet and exceed stated revenue objectives.
• Make sales calls on top management and other buyers at leading brands and their advertising and promotion agencies; identify, pursue, negotiate and close advertising and sponsorship deals for all available inventory.
• Ensure sales coverage of all significant advertising agencies and key brands that are prospects for Topix; develop sales plans for individual accounts and agencies; strong territory management skills required.
• Ensure the development of a comprehensive database of all accounts and agencies focused on the Topix audience / value proposition, and the company's activities in front of these accounts. A dedicated regimen of updating our CRM solution, Salesforce, will be key.
• Build and sustain a service-oriented culture of account management, client support and external relations.

Requirements

• A minimum of three to five years of progressively responsible internet advertising sales and/or management experience required;
• A demonstrated track record of sustained accomplishment and a strong focus on not only meeting, but exceeding stated objectives;
• Excellent written and verbal communication/presentation skills;
• Ability to work in a dynamic environment, self-motivated, utilize strong time management skills, and maintain an abiding sense of humor;
• Experience with internet-based media products, particularly new media / Web 2.0 media products;
• Demonstrable success in a start-up or fast-growth environment a plus;
• Ability to roll-up one's sleeves to get the job done; and
• A Bachelors Degree.

Additional Notes

• The East Coast RSM position will work from a home office to start. For this reason self motivation, time management skills, and an independent nature are paramount qualities.
• Once sales ramp and the revenue/territory warrants, the Regional Sales Managers will be well positioned for promotion to Director titles to hire, develop, and manage a regional sales team.

If this sounds like your kind of gig, send your resume and cover letter to recruiter@topix.com.

Community Management

Community Manager

Are you one of us?

• Your middle name is “Moderation”. You possess the ability to evenhandedly enforce Terms of Service in the face of potentially radical posted opinion that may push your every conceivable political and social button.
• You bring the funny. You see your role as not just the enforcer of the rules, but also the cruise director, showing our users where the party is and how to make the most of their time on Topix.
• You live community. You’ve been active in online community and social networking as either a Moderator or Power-User for at least two years and communicating in this medium is second nature.

Community Managers are responsible for responding to a daily influx of user questions, suggestions and concerns via email and forum posts, monitor forums for adherence to Topix Terms of Service, and step in where needed to right the proverbial ship.

Requirements include the ability to evenhandedly enforce Terms of Service in the face of potentially radical posted opinion that may challenge your own political, moral, spiritual or other such beliefs. Candidates must have a strong stomach, abundance of good humor and a passion for online community.  Previous forum experience as a Moderator or “Power User” is highly relevant to this position. Please include links to online presence with submitted materials.

If this sounds like your kind of gig, send your resume and cover letter to recruiter@topix.com.

Engineering

What are we looking for?

Sr. Software Engineer

• 5+ years of commercial programming experience that is recently web focused; strong programming skills in C; some experience with Perl a plus; knowledgeable with Linux and Apache; and great design skills.

Web/Perl Software Engineers

• 4+ years of commercial programming experience that is recently web focused; strong programming skills in Perl, and knowledgeable with Linux and Apache; great design skills and a practice of thoroughly testing code before release.

The world's changing every day, and you're working at the intersection of media and technology. As part of a small and talented team, you'll have the opportunity to make big contributions to the design and implementation of new features and systems. But at the same time, you'll have the support from an existing team and an infrastructure that has been in production for years.

Are you one of us?

You push yourself to deliver your best, but you're also easygoing enough to roll with the punches. Releasing new software to the world pumps you up, and you don't think twice about double checking and testing before a push. But you're also up for hanging out with the crew and eating pizza on the couch.

We're working on solving interesting and challenging problems related to crawling, geo-localization and subject categorization of the news, named entity disambiguation, about-vs-mention discrimination, heat and tone language detection, zero-configuration scalable crawling. All in-memory index serving. On-the-fly category merging, clustering, de-duplication, and geo-spinning. The list goes on.

We need you to help our users by improving our forums, news, editing tools, classifieds and other pages. Though we don't expect you to have expertise in solving these kinds of problems, we encourage you to come talk to us if they sound interesting.

Send your resume and cover letter to recruiter@topix.com.