Senior/Staff Backend Engineer – Fantasy Sports

About the role

Sleeper is looking for senior‑level backend engineers to own and evolve the core fantasy‑sports platform that powers millions of users across NFL, NBA and other leagues. You will design, build, and operate real‑time systems that handle drafts, scoring, trades and league chat on peak game‑day traffic.

Key responsibilities

• Design and implement core fantasy services – leagues, rosters, drafts, waivers, trades, matchups and scoring – from data model to public API.
• Scale real‑time scoring pipelines, ingest live stat feeds and deliver low‑latency updates to millions of active sessions.
• Ship end‑to‑end features in partnership with designers, mobile and web engineers.
• Maintain production health through monitoring, profiling and capacity planning ahead of each season.
• For Staff level: define system architecture, raise design standards and mentor engineers.

Required profile

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience (8+ for Staff), with a track record of shipping consumer products at massive scale.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, including data modeling, caching, queues and real‑time fan‑out correctness.
• Strong ownership mindset – you can explain decisions, reflect on trade‑offs and differentiate personal contributions from team effort.
• Passion for sports; experience with fantasy sports is a plus.

Required skills

• Proficiency in at least one backend language such as Elixir, Go, Java, Python, Rust or Node.
• Experience building and operating large‑scale distributed services.

What we offer

• Competitive salary ranging from $180,000 to $300,000 per year, plus equity.
• Comprehensive medical, dental and vision coverage, 401(k) and generous PTO.
• Hybrid work model in the San Francisco Bay Area or New York City.
• Fast career growth in a high‑impact, small‑team environment.