Ranker

La
101 - 250 employees
51 - 100 engineers
$5m - $10m funding
Series a

Ranker is a crowdsourced platform that attracts more than 30 million consumers visit a month to view, rank, and vote on broad opinion-based questions ranging from the Best Board Games to Hottest Celebrities to Best Inexpensive Cars, Ranker is the “Yelp for everything else” to consumers. Outside of a few verticals such as travel and restaurants, crowdsourced rankings are hard to find, even as consumer demand for opinion-based answers is far outpacing other queries.

A Quantcast Top 50 site, Ranker has built a solid, rapidly growing advertising and affilate ecommerce business as a publisher where consumers find highly credible, crowdsourced answers. Equally importantly, Ranker is a fully datacentric company - the enterprise value of our proprietary data may dwarf the consumer business. Our uniquely engaging interface (10% of visitors to votable rankings vote, on 21 items per visit) is the hook for a fully-semantic consumer data collection machine. This data produces continually updated rankings with intrinsic value far beyond regular pageviews and has in parallell built an “opinion graph” (people who like X also like Y, and think Z is expensive) with 6 million “edges”. Due to the datacentric way Ranker was architected, our graph is fully “clean” data, requiring no messy postprocessing or natural-language-processing. This data has immense value to market researchers, ad agencies, ad targeters, and other enterprise customers who derive value from consumer psychographics.


Why join us?

  • We are profitable

  • Founded by Clark Benson who has founded 5 other businesses, including eCrush which was acquired by Hearst at the end of 2006, as well as Almighty Music Marketing/New Releases Now. I also co-owned a now-defunct record store, Off/Beat Music in Redondo Beach, CA from '96 - '01.

  • We are one of the few tech and data focused publishers. Though ranker seems like just a publisher we are so much more. Between powering Ranker Insights with all of our voting data and our industry leading custom ad stack and ad products we push the envelope one what it means to be a digital media publisher in the modern age


Engineering at Ranker

Engineering team and processes

Our engineering team operates on two week cycles. Each cycle begins with a meeting to discuss time estimates for features, and ends with a demo meeting where each engineer can show off the work they've completed. We use Pull Requests on Bitbucket to conduct code reviews. We have 3 dev teams dedicated front end, platform and fullstack tools.

Technical Challenges

Apart from supporting the core product which is the site itself we are constantly improving our stack behind the scenes to not only improve performance and scalability but to keep us up to day with modern methodologies. Challenges range building intelligent tools that are used across the entire company to bring data to their fingertips as well to evangelizing new technological solutions to solve existing problems (like using aws rekognition for image moderation to replace a time intensive manual moderation process)

Projects you might work on
  • Fullstack Tools Team (Past Project) - Automated yield platform for driving traffic through facebook, snapchat, outbrain and nativo at positive ROI by monitoring realtime revenue and spend . Through the use of custom algos for optimizing ad spend it can scale traffic to over 5m people a day

  • Platform Engineer (Past Project) - Building an ETL pipeline to process ranker user voting data (15m / month) to produce topic correlations. This data is what is used for the Ranker Insights product ( https://insights.ranker.com)

Tech stack
Java
PHP
Spring MVC
Tomc
Laravel
Vue.js
JavaScript
CSS
HTML
Webpack
Redis
Elastic Search
MongoDB
M

Working at Ranker

Though have been around for a while we still operate like a startup . Employees that like to wear many hats and be creative and forward thinking about solving problems are our ideal candidates. Our dev team is close nit (dev / product / qa) and we value not only technical skills but social skills as well!

Perks & benefits
  • Free Food

    Weekly Lunches and bagels along with a stocked kitchen

  • Company Retreats

    Every Quarter the engineering team has an offsite which after meetings is followed by a team building event. Past off sites included things like escape rooms, scavenger hunts, bowling , bbqs ,etc

  • Flexible Hours
  • Team Activities
  • Health Insurance
Our Team by the Numbers

External Links

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