Hiring Heroes
At Outpost, we’re building an interactive entertainment platform called Hero which puts every player in the spotlight, enabling them to perform and receive fame and fortune.
But we can’t build this without a world-class team. So far we’ve brought on leaders from Twitch, EA, Zynga, Machine Zone, and more.
We have many positions open across Hero.tv, the Hero platform, SOS, devops, data analytics, and operations. I lead the platform team, but our hiring values are consistent across the company. Let’s peel back the curtain on what we’re looking for:
We believe that to create world class products, we need to assemble a world class team. We’ve created a culture of high-performance, growth, and collaboration. More simply put, our values are: “Perform Better Together.” These values shape Outpost, allowing us to build a company each day better than the last.
Perform: Be personally accountable for achieving your stated goals.
Better: Constantly strive to improve yourself and improve others.
Together: Work together as a team, communicating clearly, with empathy and honesty.
We hire people to make us better, not just to “do more work.”
What We’re Doing
We’re creating an interactive platform called Hero which we view as the future of how people will consume live entertainment. In order to showcase the best aspects of our platform, we’re also creating a game — it’s called SOS.
SOS is a reality TV styled, multiplayer survival game, where players must use their wits, the audience, and social manipulation in order to escape an island.
SOS has yet to launch, but it routinely broke the top 10 most watched games on Twitch during our alpha testing, peaking at #3, with 30k concurrent viewers!
We believe that the presence of a passionate audience can elevate any game, and so we’re extending this technology (Live Audience Dynamics) into its own platform called Hero.
So far…
We’ve created a destination at hero.tv for audiences to truly engage with their favorite broadcasters and discover the most compelling performances.
We’ve built a system where viewers express their sentiment to players in real-time and we’ve already received millions of feedback events per day.
We’ve enabled audience participation through voting, with over 100,000 votes cast on hero.tv in just our Alpha playtests.
And this is just the beginning. We’re developing many compelling features for players and viewers, including analytics, monetization, and improvements to our real-time interaction systems driven by data insights.
By hiring and building great teams, we’ll change the way people interact with entertaining content and build the future that we envision.
Who We’re Looking For
Bear with me… the Wizard of Oz is a fitting parable for who we want to hire. In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy meets and travels with three friends on her road to the Emerald City: the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Man.
The Cowardly Lion is searching for courage. We look for people who are energized by taking risks in the dream of creating something great. These are the individuals who will push themselves and those around them to perform at their best. These are people who don’t feel fulfilled at a large company doing the same thing day in and day out. We’re looking for those individuals who have the bravery to remain convicted in the face of uncertainty, but who also have the humility to admit when the data shows they’re wrong.
The Scarecrow wants a brain. The people we look for demonstrate a deep level of critical thinking. We’re often faced with challenging problems at Outpost, as we’re in uncharted territory, and we need brilliant minds to wade through the complexity. We’re always on the lookout for individuals that are exceptional in an area that doesn’t currently exist in our company in order to make us better.
The Tin Man desires a heart. We want people that have empathy for our users and coworkers. It’s a huge plus if candidates have gone through the effort to personally feel the pain points of our players and viewers. We value colleagues who are passionate about solving problems for people — those who can bring us together around a common understanding of our customer.
What it’s Like
We’ve let you know what we do, where we’re headed, and what we’re looking for here, but we haven’t talked much about what it’s actually like at Outpost.
It’s challenging. There’s complex technical and design problems everywhere, and our communication style and structure is always evolving as we grow. But it’s also exciting, refreshing, stimulating and a whole lot of fun.
Everyday I work with some of the most intelligent and passionate people in my career. We collaborate closely, daily, to explore new areas. They motivate me to shift my perspective, to grow and challenge conventional thinking.
It’s hard work, but rewarding to be fully empowered to solve problems and be decisive along the way. We believe in taking many shots on goal and learning as quickly as possible. There’s something exhilarating in going from zero to one, and then doubling down where there’s traction to grow our products.
This environment is what ultimately convinced me to join little-known Outpost in January, over the big-name tech companies in the area.
We believe in building relationships with coworkers and our community. After all, the best ideas are pitched through a mouthful of burrito from El Farolito or over a delicious bowl of Pho at Ben Tre!
Our engineering intern, Omar Shehata, beautifully summed up life at Outpost:
I just wanted to give a shout out to EVERYONE here for making this summer such an awesome experience. It was very inspiring watching everyone working together over the last few months. Everyone has this long history in the industry and mind-blowingly impressive achievements, and yet the modesty to listen. Working well in a team isn’t about acquiescing to whatever you’re told. I saw people openly criticize our vision and direction, and it would either be justified, or changed.
I’m also super grateful for the improv workshop and getting an opportunity to stream. I knew theoretically all the values we were creating with our game, but I saw just how empowering it feels to be in the center of attention, to have a supportive audience, and to tell stories to them. It was also incredibly important to me to be able to expose the process behind what I do. That writing code isn’t black magic, but it’s fun, creative, and accessible.
I encourage you to check out our Glassdoor page to learn from others about what it’s like here at Outpost!
Interested?
If this resonates, I’d love to hear from you. Apply at outpostjobs.com and let me know in the “Additional Information” section of the application that you read this article.
Let’s build a great company together.
- Albert
