Senior / Staff Backend Software Engineer, Sleeper
Fantasy Sports
$180-300k
+ Equity + Bonus
Fantasy sports app
Be an early applicant
Fantasy sports app
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
$180-300k
+ Equity + Bonus
101-200 employees
Company mission
To connect people over sports.
Role
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
- Deep in distributed systems: data modeling, caching, queues, and the correctness questions that come with real-time fan-out
- 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 fantasy — you'll build a better product if you know what it's like to lose a matchup on Monday night
- Based in the San Francisco Bay Area or New York City, working hybrid
What the job involves
- We're hiring Senior and Staff Backend Engineers for our fantasy sports product — season-long leagues, drafts, waivers, trades, matchups, live scoring, and the league chat that holds it all together, across NFL, NBA, and more. Fantasy is where Sleeper started, and it remains the core of the platform
- The work is backend engineering at real scale on a calendar that doesn't move. Millions of users are active at once on game days, live scoring has to reach every roster quickly and correctly, and drafts run in real time. Traffic peaks hard, and the systems behind it have to be fast, reliable, and right
- 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
- Build and own the core systems behind fantasy — leagues, rosters, drafts, waivers and trades, matchups, and scoring — from data model to API
- Scale real-time scoring: ingest live stat feeds and deliver every change to millions of rosters and open app sessions with low latency and correct results
- Ship features end to end with designers and our mobile and web engineers, from a rough idea to something in millions of users' hands
- Keep production healthy: monitoring, profiling, and capacity planning ahead of the season, so bottlenecks get found before Sunday finds them
- 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
Our take
The popularity of being able to create fantasy teams and enjoy watching sports virtually has taken socialising around sports to a virtual level. In fact, the fantasy sports market size is expected to reach $48.6 billion by 2027. Sleeper was initially an app on which users discussed fantasy sports, but in 2017, it began hosting free fantasy football leagues, competing with sites like Yahoo. Integrating social media and sports, the company is now known to be one of the best DFS communities to hang out on.
Through substantial funding, Sleeper is expanding the game offerings on its platform and in 2022, release a new feature called Wallet that enables users to sync their preferred payment methods to the platform.
There has been consistent growth for the platform since its founding and it has successfully attracted a loyal user base.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Sep 2021
$40m
SERIES C
May 2020
$20m
SERIES B
Total funding: $67.3m
Company benefits
- 401k and health insurance
- Unlimited Vacations
- Regular virtual game-time with the team with company-sponsored snacks
- Company-sponsored fantasy leagues with real prizes
- Team outing every quarter and company retreat once a year
Company HQ
Paradise, NV
Leadership
Nan Wang
(Co-Founder & CEO)After studying went on to become a Senior Analyst at Fidelity Investments, Representative for China Investment Corporation and Private Equity Investor at Neuberger Berman.
Henry Leung
(Co-Founder)Worked as an Android Developer at Vevo, Senior iOS Developer at Dwell Media and Lead Mobile Engineer at Whil Concepts.
Ken Wang
(Co-Founder)Previously worked as a NET Web Engineer at Genex/O’Grady Meyers, Senior C# Engineer at Decore-ative Specialties and UI Engineering Tech Lead (TV/Console Platform) at Vevo.
Weixi Yen
(Co-Founder)Worked as a Software Engineer at Kabam and then went on to work through several roles at Storm8, most recently as an Engineering Manager.
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