Job Description
"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 longreads, news, and blogger posts, follow matches, and be part of the community.
WHAT YOU WILL DO
We have a department focused on attracting target traffic from various sources. We are currently looking for a strong SEO Specialist for this team. You will be working with technical SEO for a high-load project: there are many events, legacy code, and SPA+SSR. The work will involve two main areas: supporting product development and managing our own technical backlog for the existing website.
With us, you will:
- Manage the technical SEO backlog: conduct audits and refine existing sections and templates, implement and fix micro-markup on live pages, resolve issues with indexing, duplicates, redirects, and speed.
- Support product development from start to release. Write SEO requirements for product technical specifications and mockups: semantic page and widget markup, routing, metadata templates for auto-generated pages, micro-markup, and other requirements.
- Improve the technical state of the site: work with SPA/SSR indexing and rendering, response codes, sitemap, and Core Web Vitals, check the SEO aspects of releases.
- Consult with adjacent teams: find solutions at the intersection of SEO, product, editorial, and commercial.
- Analyze indexing, visibility, and traffic, evaluate the impact of implementations, and prioritize the SEO backlog.
- Maintain a knowledge base: SEO guidelines, ready-made technical specifications for page types, products, and widgets.
WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR IN CANDIDATES
- You have relevant experience in technical SEO and proven case studies of technical implementations on large projects with measurable results.
- You have a strong technical SEO foundation: you know how Google and Yandex crawl, render, and index JS websites (SSR/CSR, initial HTML). You are proficient in canonicalization, redirects, schema.org / JSON-LD, and Core Web Vitals.
- You understand the specifics of news projects: Google News and Discover, content freshness, live pages, monetization.
- You have an understanding of microservice architecture and HTTP (headers, caching, conditional requests), as well as experience writing technical specifications for developers (semantic markup, micro-markup, routing, and other technical requirements).
- You can work with data and make decisions based on it.
- It will be a plus if you are knowledgeable about sports.
WHAT WE OFFER YOU
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, which you can determine yourself.
- Convenient work format. You can work fully remotely, and if you wish, there is an opportunity to visit our cozy office in the center of Moscow.
- Voluntary medical insurance (DMS) with dental coverage throughout Russia from your first day of work. A personal annual budget for sports activities for all employees and for coworking space if you are not working in Moscow.
- If you need vacation, we will always provide it. As well as sick leave, which in most cases does not lead to a loss of income.
- As a pleasant bonus, we have an employee loyalty program with hundreds of different discounts.
- Accredited IT company status.
Training and development support:
- We have very supportive management that genuinely invests in their employees. More than half of them have grown within the company, and we see this as a testament to our approach.
- We value feedback, so we actively use practices that help us improve: one-to-one meetings, performance reviews.
- We regularly purchase access to popular conferences for our teams so that our people always stay on top of trends.
- We also don't forget about traditional learning, so we offer compensation for specialized courses.
Not just colleagues, but a community:
- We have sports teams for football, basketball, and padel, a FIFA fan club, and a film club. We also enjoy playing board games and practice random coffee chats.
- We are reasonable and "down-to-earth" people. No pretentiousness, snobbery, or showing off. No stuffiness or toxicity.
HOW WE HIRE
We don't like formalities or drawn-out processes, and we approach hiring the same way. You can expect:
- A short 20-minute HR interview, where we will tell you more about us, and you – about yourself.
- An interview with your potential manager, where we will discuss your experience and our tasks.
- A test assignment to help us assess your practical skills.
- And a final interview with the Operations Director and HR Director, where we will make sure we are a good fit for each other.
