Senior / Staff Backend Software Engineer (Picks, DFS & Prediction Markets)

Sleeper; United States; Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401k

Health insurance

Team outings

Company retreats

Fantasy leagues with real prizes

Unlimited vacations

Snacks

Job summary

Sleeper is hiring Senior and Staff Backend Engineers for Sleeper Picks, our real-money product. You will own core backend systems end to end, including contests, pricing, settlement, wallet, and data services, and work closely with designers, mobile, and web teams.

We value engineers who make product decisions, ship features end to end, and design for scale and reliability. Hybrid work from the US, with a focus on architecture leadership and production-grade systems.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience (Staff requires 8+ years)
• Strong track record owning architecture and end-to-end systems
• Experience with real-money gaming, payments, or marketplaces preferred
• Proficiency in at least one backend language: Elixir, Go, Java, Python, Rust, Node, or similar

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of critical backend systems end to end.
• Design, implement, and deploy services across the contest, pricing, settlement, wallet, and data layers.
• Collaborate with designers and mobile/web teams to ship features from idea to users.
• Work with risk/trading teams on exposure management and internal tooling.

Skills

Backend languages

Distributed systems

Real-time data processing

Job description

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

5+ years of backend engineering. For Staff, 8+ years and a track record of owning the architecture of systems at this scaleYou’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 elseDeep in distributed systems: data modeling, caching, queues, and the correctness questions that come with real-time updates and concurrent writesYou’ve shipped features end to end — not only infrastructureYou can go deep on your own work: what you decided, what you’d do differently, and where your contribution ended and the team’s beganBased in the San Francisco Bay Area or New York City, working hybridYou’ve built and operated consumer products with millions of users, and you understand what your code does in production at that scaleYou’re a sports fan. Best case, you play DFS, use a sportsbook, or trade prediction markets — and you have opinions about how they should workStrong in at least one backend language — Elixir, Go, Java, Python, Rust, Node, or similar