Staff Software Engineer – Backend

About the role

Sleeper is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to own and scale the core backend systems that power its fantasy sports and daily fantasy contests. You will drive architectural decisions, build high‑performance services, and mentor engineers as the platform serves tens of millions of users.

Key responsibilities

• Design and implement backend systems for fantasy contests, user profiles, leaderboards, and real‑time game logic.
• Architect distributed, low‑latency services that handle millions of concurrent users.
• Lead initiatives from concept through deployment, ensuring clean interfaces and resilient infrastructure.
• Monitor performance, profile bottlenecks, and conduct capacity planning.
• Collaborate with product, design, and frontend teams to deliver user‑focused features.
• Mentor engineers, conduct code reviews, and define backend best practices.
• Influence technical direction and culture at the leadership level.

Required profile

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience, including staff‑level or tech‑lead roles.
• Proven track record designing and scaling distributed systems for real‑time or gaming workloads.
• Strong proficiency in at least one backend language such as Go, Python, Node.js, or Java.
• Deep knowledge of SQL and NoSQL databases, caching strategies, and message‑queue systems.
• Experience building and maintaining RESTful or GraphQL APIs and related data models.

Required skills

• Go
• Python
• Node.js
• Java
• SQL
• NoSQL
• Caching strategies
• Kafka
• RabbitMQ
• Pub/Sub
• RESTful APIs
• GraphQL APIs