Senior / Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Picks - DFS & Prediction Markets)

Sleeper • New York, NY

8d • $180,000 - $300,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

We'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.

Requirements

• 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Benefits

• 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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed