Staff Software Engineer (Backend)

Join Sleeper, a leading platform in fantasy sports and daily fantasy sports (DFS). As a Staff Software Engineer (Backend), you will drive architectural decisions, build critical backend services, and mentor fellow engineers. You will collaborate cross-functionally to bring innovative features to life and own major parts of the backend stack. This role offers unlimited vacations, team outings, company-sponsored fantasy leagues, 401k and health insurance, and regular virtual game-time with the team.

• Architect scalable, distributed systems capable of handling millions of concurrent users with low latency and high availability.
• Lead backend initiatives from concept to deployment, ensuring clean interfaces, well-documented services, and resilient infrastructure.
• Mentor engineers, provide thoughtful code reviews, and shape backend engineering best practices and standards.
• 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)
• 7+ years of backend software engineering experience, including experience in staff-level or tech lead roles
• Strong product mindset—you care about the why, not just the how, and you build with users in mind
• Deep knowledge of databases (both SQL and NoSQL), caching strategies, and message queues (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, Pub/Sub)
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills. You elevate your teammates and enjoy mentoring
• Proven ability to design and scale distributed systems that serve millions of users in real-time or gaming environments
• Bonus: Passion for sports, gaming, or building multiplayer or real-time systems
• Strong proficiency in one or more backend languages (e.g., Go, Python, Node.js, Java), and an understanding of trade-offs between them