Software Engineer - Backend

1w1 week ago

Sleeper

San Francisco, US · Full-time · $180,000 – $250,000

About this role

Sleeper is on a mission to connect people over sports through games and community. As one of the fastest-growing platforms in the fantasy sports and real-money gaming space, we're redefining how sports fans engage through season-long leagues, pick'em contests, and real-time interactions. We're seeking a Software Engineer - Backend to scale core systems for fantasy sports and DFS offerings.

You'll design and build backend services powering games, real-time user experiences, fantasy contests, Sleeper Picks, user profiles, and leaderboards. Own initiatives from concept to deployment, ensuring clean interfaces, well-documented services, and resilient infrastructure. Optimize performance through monitoring, profiling, and capacity planning.

Our lean, passionate, product-driven team obsesses over user experience and builds delightful, fast, reliable products. Collaborate cross-functionally with product, design, and frontend teams to deliver innovative features like real-time contest engines, game logic, personalized content, and secure payments. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst, we scale to tens of millions of users.

Enjoy massive impact touching millions of users, high ownership for high-leverage decisions, and startup agility to ship often. Join a culture-first team of builders, thinkers, and sports lovers valuing humility, collaboration, and fun. Help shape the future of sports engagement.

Requirements

3+ years of backend software engineering experience
Proven ability to build 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
Solid 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

Responsibilities

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
Build scalable, distributed systems capable of handling millions of concurrent users with low latency and high availability
Own 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
Contribute thoughtful code reviews and help strengthen backend engineering best practices and standards

Benefits

Massive Impact – Your work will touch millions of users and help shape the next generation of sports entertainment
High Ownership – We trust our engineers to make high-leverage decisions and drive meaningful outcomes
Startup Agility – Move fast, ship often, and see your work in the hands of users quickly
Culture-First Team – We're a team of builders, thinkers, and sports lovers who value humility, collaboration, and having fun along the way