Senior / Staff Backend Software Engineer

Who you are

• 5+ years of backend engineering. For Staff, 8+ years and a track record of owning the architecture of systems at this scale
• You've built and operated consumer products with millions of users, and you understand what your code does in production at that scale
• You've shipped features end to end — not only infrastructure
• You've worked on systems where being wrong costs money — payments, trading, marketplaces, ledgers, or real-money gaming — or you can show the same rigor from somewhere else
• Deep in distributed systems: data modeling, caching, queues, and the correctness questions that come with real-time updates and concurrent writes
• Strong in at least one backend language — Elixir, Go, Java, Python, Rust, Node, or similar
• You can go deep on your own work: what you decided, what you'd do differently, and where your contribution ended and the team's began
• You're a sports fan. Best case, you play DFS, use a sportsbook, or trade prediction markets — and you have opinions about how they should work
• Based in the San Francisco Bay Area or New York City, working hybrid

What the job involves

• We're hiring Senior and Staff Backend Engineers for Sleeper Picks, our real-money product
• Picks is two games sharing one wallet and one user: daily fantasy sports, where users pick player stat lines over or under a projection, and prediction markets, where they take positions on game and team outcomes at prices that move right up to the whistle
• Real money changes the engineering
• Prices move in real time, entries surge before games start, and everything has to settle correctly the moment a game goes final
• A stale price or a ledger that doesn't reconcile isn't a bug — it's a trust and compliance problem
• The surface area is wide and you can touch any of it: contests and entries, pricing and market data, risk and exposure, settlement, wallet and payments, eligibility and compliance
• You'll own systems and features end to end: the data model, the service behind it, and the API contract with our mobile and web teams, working directly with designers
• Engineers make product decisions here, not just implement them
• Build and own core Picks systems end to end — contest and entry lifecycle, pricing and market data, settlement and grading, wallet and ledger, eligibility and compliance
• Make real money correct: reconciliation, auditability, and settlement logic that is right the first time
• Handle real-time at scale: continuously moving prices and positions, entry surges before games start, and settlement across every game on the slate
• Partner with our risk and trading team on exposure management and the internal tooling they need
• Integrate with third-party projection, market, and payments providers, and design for their failures as well as ours
• Ship features end to end with designers and our mobile and web engineers, from a rough idea to something in users' hands
• At Staff: own the architecture of the systems you work in, raise the bar through design and code review, and help other engineers ship at scale

Benefits

• 401k and health insurance
• Unlimited Vacations
• Regular virtual game-time with the team with company-sponsored snacks
• Company-sponsored fantasy leagues with real prizes
• Team outing every quarter and company retreat once a year