All Work
Case Study

Big Top

Recruiting and career management reimagined — hyperlocal job listings, community-first networking, and an AI-powered web scraping engine that transformed the Triangle region's tech talent marketplace.

Visit the Platform

"Big Top combines networking with hyperlocal job listings and engaging content to connect applicants with the hottest companies and jobs in their community."

Acquired by American Underground
bigtop.it
100s
Hyperlocal tech
jobs listed daily
15mo
Manual process
eliminated
Daily
Automated
crawl cadence
Acquired
By American
Underground
About Big Top

Where Community Meets
Career Opportunity

Big Top was built on a clear-eyed understanding of what job seekers in the Triangle region of North Carolina actually needed: not another national job board with thousands of irrelevant listings, but a hyperlocal platform that understood their community — the companies, the culture, and the people behind the hiring decisions.

The platform combined a comprehensive, regularly updated job board with the kind of engaging editorial content that helps candidates understand not just where the jobs are, but which companies are worth getting excited about. For women navigating tech careers in a competitive market — where representation still lags and networking still matters — Big Top's community-first approach provided a meaningful advantage.

The team at American Underground — Durham's legendary startup hub — recognized the platform's value and acquired Big Top in June 2017 as part of their strategy to serve growing technology and startup companies across the Triangle.

Recruiting Career Management Hyperlocal Triangle NC Community Tech Women in Tech
Big Top platform
Community Impact

Built for the Community
It Served

Big Top wasn't just a product — it was infrastructure for a community's economic mobility. The people it served most were the ones the traditional job market most consistently overlooked.

👩🏽‍💻
Women in Tech
By surfacing local opportunities at startup-stage companies — where culture and leadership still being shaped — Big Top gave women tech professionals a direct line to the roles where they could make the most impact and build the most equity.
🏙️
Local Talent Ecosystem
The platform gave Triangle-area job seekers something national boards couldn't: a living, updated-daily picture of what was actually hiring in their backyard — keeping local talent local and strengthening the regional tech economy.
🤝
Startup Community
American Underground's acquisition validated the platform's strategic value — integrating Big Top into a broader ecosystem of startup support, mentorship, and community investment that continues to define the Triangle's entrepreneurial culture.
The Challenge

Scraping the Internet —
Automating the Impossible

The Big Top website listed hundreds of jobs from local tech companies — and for 15 months, the team had been filling that board by hand. Every job title, description, and requirement had to be manually sourced, copied, formatted, and published. It was slow, expensive, and constantly behind the market.

"The process was arduous, expensive, and most importantly out of date — they typically couldn't update but on an 8–12 week rolling basis. More and more individuals looked to this directory as a one-stop source."

The gap between when jobs were posted and when Big Top could reflect them was real friction for job seekers — especially those relying on the platform for time-sensitive career decisions. Every 8-week lag was a missed opportunity for a candidate, and a missed connection for a company doing the hiring.

YT Advisors was brought in to build a completely new technical foundation: a custom, proprietary tool that could do automatically what the team had been doing manually — at scale, daily, with intelligence layered on top.

8–12
weeks between
content updates
15mo
of fully manual
job board management
100s
of local companies
to monitor
$0
automated tooling
in place on day one
Big Top job platform interface
Our Approach

A New Way to Work —
Built to Scale

We designed and built a proprietary automation system from the ground up — combining intelligent web crawling, machine learning classification, and seamless plugin integration to eliminate the manual burden entirely.

Proprietary Web Scraper
We built a custom crawling tool that targets a curated list of Triangle-area tech company career pages, visits each daily, and reliably extracts job titles, descriptions, and requirements — without any manual input.
ML Job Categorization
A machine learning API classifies each scraped job by type — engineering, design, operations, sales — using the raw text data. This powers filtered search and personalized discovery without any manual tagging.
Daily Automated Updates
Replacing the 8–12 week refresh cycle with a daily crawl means the job board is always current — reflecting new postings and removing closed roles automatically, without staff intervention.
Third-Party Plugin Integration
The scraper feeds a structured database that integrates with the site's existing job board plugin — populating listings, managing expirations, and syncing metadata automatically on every crawl cycle.
Structured Job Database
All scraped and classified jobs land in a clean, queryable database designed for fast retrieval and flexible front-end presentation — supporting filters, category browsing, and featured company spotlights.
On-Time, On-Budget Delivery
We delivered the full system — scraper, classifier, database, and integration — on time and on budget. Months later, the platform's strengthened value contributed directly to Big Top's acquisition by American Underground.
The Build

Intelligence Under
the Hood

Big Top website interface
AI-Powered Recruiting Intelligence
The original machine API integration planted the seed. We've since extended the system with a broader AI intelligence layer — giving Big Top the data and insight to serve its community with precision.
Smart Job Matching Engine
NLP-based candidate matching compares a job seeker's profile against scraped listings in real time — surfacing the most relevant roles by skill overlap, career level, and company stage fit, not just keywords.
Diversity Signal Detection
NLP scans job postings for language patterns correlated with inclusive — or exclusionary — hiring cultures, giving women and underrepresented candidates a signal about where they're most likely to land and thrive.
Local Market Trend Intelligence
Automated analysis of scraping data surfaces hiring velocity trends by company, role type, and skill category — giving the Big Top team editorial intelligence to spotlight what's hot before job seekers even know to search for it.
Candidate Engagement Analytics
ML-driven behavioral analytics tracks which listings, companies, and content types drive the most repeat visits and applications — feeding back into both editorial curation and the automated ranking of featured postings.
🏆
Acquisition Outcome
Big Top's technical transformation directly contributed to its acquisition by American Underground / ExitEvent — one of the Southeast's most recognized startup ecosystems. The platform was absorbed into their community infrastructure to serve the growing Triangle tech community. We delivered on time, on budget — and the work spoke for itself.
Outcomes

From Manual Process
to Acquisition-Ready Platform

15 months of manual work — eliminated Daily automated job board updates ML job classification live Custom scraper delivered on-time Platform acquired by American Underground Community talent infrastructure built AI intelligence layer added
Built With
PHP WordPress Custom Scraper Machine API MySQL Job Board Plugin Python REST APIs Cron Automation
Big Top platform

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