About the role
Location: Remote-friendly. Preference for SF Bay Area, Los Angeles, NYC, or Pacific Northwest. About Sleeper 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—whether it’s through season-long leagues, pick’em contests, or real-time interactions with friends. Our team is lean, passionate, and product-driven. We obsess over user experience and believe that building delightful, fast, and reliable products is the best way to grow. Backed by some of the most respected investors in Silicon Valley, including Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst, we're building the future of sports engagement.
About
the Role 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. What You’ll Do 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.