«Making sports better» is the most accurate definition of our core mission, which has remained unchanged for 27 years. We make sports more accessible, understandable, and interesting by creating quality content and distributing it across all possible platforms.
Sports.ru is not just a sports news website. It is the leading Russian-language sports media with a multi-million audience, where you can read long reads, news, and blogger posts, follow matches, and be part of the community.
WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING
We have a department that focuses on attracting target traffic from various sources. We are currently looking for a Head of SEO to join them – a "player-coach" who can build the strategy and processes, but is also a strong technical specialist ready to get hands-on when necessary.
The project is high-load: legacy, SPA+SSR, many events, and close collaboration with development and product teams.
With us, you will:
- Be responsible for SEO strategy and search traffic growth: form and prioritize the backlog, evaluate the impact of implementations.
- Manage a team: build processes, delegate tasks, control quality, develop employees, participate in hiring.
- Personally handle part of the technical SEO tasks: audit and improve templates, micro-markup, indexing, duplicates, sitemap, Core Web Vitals. Formulate SEO requirements for technical specifications and mockups, and participate in release acceptance.
- Oversee the launch of new projects within the product, design the site structure and internal linking, including for automatically generated pages.
- Build collaboration with development, product, editorial, marketing, and sales teams – find compromises between their interests and SEO.
- Analyze competitors, identify growth opportunities, test hypotheses.
WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR IN CANDIDATES
- You have relevant experience in SEO and proven case studies of traffic growth and technical implementations on large projects – media, content sites, aggregators.
- You have managed an SEO team: you know how to set tasks, build processes, hire, develop, and motivate employees.
- You have a strong technical SEO foundation: you know how Google and Yandex scan, render, and index JS sites (SSR/CSR, raw HTML). You know how to work with canonicalization, redirects, schema.org / JSON-LD, and Core Web Vitals.
- You understand microservice architecture and HTTP (headers, caching, conditional requests), and have experience writing technical specifications for developers, webmasters, and copywriters.
- You are familiar with the specifics of news projects: Google News and Discover, content freshness, live pages, monetization.
- You can work with data: forecast impact, evaluate results, and justify priorities to product and business teams.
- It will be a plus if you are knowledgeable about sports.
WHAT WE OFFER IN RETURN
Comfort and care:
- We don't micromanage or track working hours, as we trust our people. Therefore, we have a flexible start and end to the workday that you can determine yourself.
- Hybrid work schedule. We encourage meeting colleagues in person at our Moscow office (near Prospekt Mira/Rizhskaya metro stations), but remote work is sometimes possible.
- Voluntary Medical Insurance (DMS) with dental coverage across all of Russia from your first day of employment. A personal annual budget for sports activities.
- If you need a vacation, we will always provide it. As well as sick leave, which in most cases does not lead to financial loss.
- As a pleasant bonus, we have an employee loyalty program with hundreds of different discounts.
Learning and development support:
- We have very supportive management that truly invests in their employees. More than half of them have grown within the company, and this is significant for us.
- We value feedback, so we practice methods that help us improve: one-to-ones, performance reviews.
- We regularly purchase access to popular conferences for our teams so that our staff always stay on trend.
- We also don't forget about traditional learning methods, so we offer compensation for professional courses.
Not just colleagues, but a community:
- We enjoy spending time together not only at work, which is why we have various interest-based communities: a football team, a FIFA club, a film club. We love board games, practice random coffee chats, and simply connect during the week to chat with colleagues about non-work-related topics.
- In general, we have sensible and genuinely "down-to-earth" people working here. No pretense, snobbery, or showing off. No stuffiness or toxicity.
WHAT THE HIRING PROCESS LOOKS LIKE
We dislike formalities and lengthy processes, and we approach hiring the same way. You can expect:
- A short 20-minute HR interview, where we'll tell you a bit more about us, and you'll tell us about yourself.
- An interview with your potential manager, where we'll discuss your experience and our tasks.
- A test assignment to help us assess your practical skills.
- And a final interview with the COO and HRD, where we'll make sure we're a good fit for each other.
