Senior Software Engineer, Backend

About Sleeper
Sleeper is on a mission to connect people over sports through games and community. As one of the fastest-growing platforms in the fantasy sports and real-money gaming space were redefining how sports fans engagewhether its through season-long leagues pickem contests or real-time interactions with friends.

Our team is lean passionate and product-driven. We obsess over user experience and believe that building delightful fast and reliable products is the best way to grow. Backed by some of the most respected investors in Silicon Valley including Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst were building the future of sports engagement.

About the Role
Were looking for a Senior Software Engineer - Backend to help us scale the core systems behind our fantasy sports and DFS (Daily Fantasy Sports) this role youll build and own critical backend services and collaborate with fellow engineers as we scale to support tens of millions of passionate sports fans.

Youll collaborate cross-functionally to bring innovative features to lifefrom real-time contest engines and game logic to personalized content and secure seamless payments. Youll own significant parts of the backend stack and help raise the bar for performance scalability and reliability at Sleeper.

What Youll Do

• Design and build core backend systems that power Sleepers games and real-time user experiencesfantasy contests Sleeper Picks user profiles leaderboards and more.

• Build scalable distributed systems capable of handling millions of concurrent users with low latency and high availability.

• Own backend initiatives from concept to deployment ensuring clean interfaces well-documented services and resilient infrastructure.

• Optimize system performance and proactively address bottlenecks through monitoring profiling and capacity planning.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with product design and frontend teams to deliver features that users love.

• Contribute thoughtful code reviews and help strengthen backend engineering best practices and standards.

Who You Are

• 5 years of backend software engineering experience.

• Proven ability to build and scale distributed systems that serve millions of users in real-time or gaming environments.

• Strong proficiency in one or more backend languages (e.g. Go Python Java) and an understanding of trade-offs between them.

• Solid knowledge of databases (both SQL and NoSQL) caching strategies and message queues (e.g. Kafka RabbitMQ Pub/Sub).

• Comfortable designing and maintaining RESTful and/or graphql APIs data models and internal tooling.

• Cloud experience (AWS GCP or similar) with familiarity with containers (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes a plus).

• Strong product mindsetyou care about the why not just the how and you build with users in mind.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

• Bonus: Proficiency in Elixir

• Bonus: Passion for sports gaming or building multiplayer or real-time systems.

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 Were a team of builders thinkers and sports lovers who value humility collaboration and having fun along the way.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary ($170000$220000) /year not inclusive of stock options and benefits)

• Equity

• Comprehensive medical dental and vision insurance

• 401(k) with company matching

• Generous PTO and flexible remote work policy

• Opportunities for fast career growth in a high-impact role

• A small focused team where your contributions truly matter

Required Experience:

Senior IC