About the RoleWe'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.
What You'll Do- 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.
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.
Why Join Sleeper?- Massive Impact - Your work will touch millions of users and help shape the next generation of sports entertainment.
- High Ownership - We trust our engineers to make high-leverage decisions and drive meaningful outcomes.
- Startup Agility - Move fast, ship often, and see your work in the hands of users quickly.
- Culture-First Team - We're a team of builders, thinkers, and sports lovers who value humility, collaboration, and having fun along the way.
What We Offer- Competitive salary $180,000-$300,000/year (level and base set by experience; not inclusive of stock options and benefits)
- Equity
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance
- 401(k)
- Generous PTO and a hybrid work policy (San Francisco Bay Area or New York City)
- Opportunities for fast career growth in a high-impact role
- A small, focused team where your contributions truly matter
Our Hiring PhilosophySleeper believes in quality over quantity, and intentionally keeps our team small as a result. In past roles, we found it very hard to make a big impact when companies grow too large in size, which has a detrimental effect on the product and the impact any single individual can have. Our team includes designers, engineers, product experts, and finance & operation focused on one thing - connecting people over sports. We believe in fair and equitable pay. Certain locations in the United States require job postings to include a reasonable estimate of the base salary range and/or a general description of benefits and other compensation applicable to the role.
Competitive salary plus benefits including Medical, Dental, PTO, 401k. Please note that The salary range for this role ($180,000 to $300,000 per year salary) takes into account a wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including, but not limited to, skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs.
