Senior Lead Software Engineer, AI Engineering

DraftKings • Boston, MA

76d • $160,700 - $200,900

About The Position

At DraftKings, AI is becoming an integral part of both our present and future, powering how work gets done today, guiding smarter decisions, and sparking bold ideas. It's transforming how we enhance customer experiences, streamline operations, and unlock new possibilities. Our teams are energized by innovation and readily embrace emerging technology. We're not waiting for the future to arrive. We're shaping it, one bold step at a time. To those who see AI as a driver of progress, come build the future together. DraftKings is growing quickly and we're looking for a Senior Lead Software Engineer to direct our engineering teams and influence our product roadmap. This is more than a technical position, though. You'll be collaborating across teams, informing our business decisions, and creatively finding solutions to all of our scaling challenges.

Requirements

• 6+ years of experience building distributed systems, APIs, or backend platforms in cloud-native environments.
• Strong proficiency in at least one backend language (e.g., Python, Go, C#, or Java) and experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CDK, etc.).
• Familiarity with production-grade AI systems: LLM orchestration, vector databases, embedding models, or safety layers.
• Solid understanding of performance optimization, structured logging, and cost governance in AI or platform contexts.
• Comfort designing systems from scratch as well as iterating on legacy code and architecture.
• Bias for action, ownership mindset, and a collaborative approach to solving ambiguous problems.

Nice To Haves

• Bonus: contributions to open-source projects in the AI space.

Responsibilities

• Take ownership of the design, development, and operations of core AI platform components-ranging from LLM runtime services to vector stores and evaluation harnesses.
• Guide your team and partner teams in building secure, scalable APIs and cloud-native services using Python, Go, or C#, and AWS infrastructure.
• Be the first voice for engineering on the systems your team owns-balancing reliability, cost, velocity, and safety.
• Lead design sessions and architecture reviews, ensuring high engineering quality, long-term maintainability, and platform consistency.
• Champion data-driven decision-making: use metrics to prioritize, de-risk, and continuously improve team throughput and platform efficiency.
• Help build a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and continuous improvement.

Benefits

• Base salary range of 160,700.00 USD - 200,900.00 USD, plus bonus, equity, and benefits as applicable.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Industry: Performing Arts, Spectator Sports, and Related Industries
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees