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Salary: USD 180,000 - 300,000 / annual
Sleeper is a fast-growing fantasy sports and real-money gaming platform on a mission to connect people over sports through season-long leagues, pick'em contests, and real-time community interactions. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst, the company is building the next generation of sports engagement.
You will own core backend systems for fantasy sports end-to-end: leagues, rosters, drafts, waivers, trades, matchups, and scoring. The work operates at real scale—millions of users are active simultaneously on game days, live scoring must reach every roster with low latency and correctness, and traffic peaks hard on Sundays. You'll design the data models, build the services, and define API contracts with mobile and web teams, working directly with designers.
Key responsibilities include:
- Building and owning core fantasy systems from data model through API
- Scaling real-time scoring: ingesting live stat feeds and delivering changes to millions of rosters and open app sessions with low latency
- Shipping features end-to-end with designers and mobile/web engineers
- Maintaining production health through monitoring, profiling, and capacity planning ahead of the season
- For Staff level: owning system architecture, raising the bar through design and code review, and helping other engineers ship at scale
Engineers make product decisions here, not just implement them. You'll have high ownership and the ability to drive meaningful outcomes in a lean, product-driven team.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of backend engineering experience (8+ years for Staff level with track record of owning system architecture at scale)
- Experience building and operating consumer products with millions of users, with deep understanding of production behavior at scale
- End-to-end feature shipping experience (not infrastructure-only)
- Deep expertise in distributed systems: data modeling, caching, queues, and real-time correctness patterns
- Strong proficiency in at least one backend language: Elixir, Go, Java, Python, Rust, Node, or similar
- Ability to go deep on your own work: decisions made, what you'd do differently, and where your contribution ended
- Sports fan background; fantasy sports experience preferred
- Based in San Francisco Bay Area or New York City, working hybrid
