Staff Software Engineer, Sleeper
Backend
$225-300k
+ Equity
More information about location
Fantasy sports app
Be an early applicant
Fantasy sports app
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
$225-300k
+ Equity
More information about location
101-200 employees
Company mission
To connect people over sports.
Role
Who you are
- 7+ years of backend software engineering experience, including experience in staff-level or tech lead roles
- Proven ability to design 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, Node.js, Java), and an understanding of trade-offs between them
- Deep 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 mindset—you care about the why, not just the how, and you build with users in mind
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills. You elevate your teammates and enjoy mentoring
- Bonus: Passion for sports, gaming, or building multiplayer or real-time systems
What the job involves
- We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer - Backend to help us scale the core systems behind our fantasy sports and DFS (Daily Fantasy Sports) offerings
- In this role, you’ll drive architectural decisions, build critical backend services, and mentor fellow engineers as we scale to support tens of millions of passionate sports fans
- As a senior technical leader, you’ll collaborate cross-functionally to bring innovative features to life—from real-time contest engines and game logic to personalized content and secure, seamless payments
- You’ll be empowered to own major parts of the backend stack and help define what "great" looks like in terms of performance, scalability, and reliability at Sleeper
- Design and build core backend systems that power Sleeper's games and real-time user experiences—fantasy contests, Sleeper Picks, user profiles, leaderboards, and more
- 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
- 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
- Mentor engineers, provide thoughtful code reviews, and shape backend engineering best practices and standards
- Drive innovation, technical direction, and team culture as a key engineering voice at the leadership level
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
(CEO & Co-Founder)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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