Staff Software Engineer - Backend (Sleeper)
Posted on: December 16, 2025 | Remote (SF Bay Area)
Company Name: Sleeper.com | Department: Engineering
Division: Information Technology | Employment Type: Full-Time
Location: Las Vegas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, USA)
Schedule: Remote | Experience Level: 5+ Years
About Sleeper: Connecting People Over Sports
Sleeper is on an ambitious mission to connect people over sports through innovative games and vibrant community experiences. As one of the fastest-growing platforms in the fantasy sports and real-money gaming space, we're fundamentally redefining how sports fans engage with their favorite games and connect with friends—whether through season-long fantasy leagues, exciting pick'em contests, or real-time interactions that bring the excitement of sports to life.
Our Team and Philosophy
Our team is intentionally lean, deeply passionate, and relentlessly product-driven. We obsess over user experience because we believe that building delightful, fast, and reliable products is the most sustainable and effective way to grow. Every decision we make is filtered through the lens of "does this make the experience better for our users?"
This focus on quality over quantity extends to our hiring philosophy. At Sleeper, we intentionally keep our team small because we've learned from past experiences that massive organizational growth often has a detrimental effect on both the product and the impact any single individual can have. When companies grow too large, it becomes incredibly difficult to make meaningful contributions and maintain the agility needed to build exceptional products.
Our Backing and Vision
Backed by some of the most respected investors in Silicon Valley, including Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and Expa, we're building the future of sports engagement with the resources and support to think big while maintaining our startup agility and execution speed. Our headquarters in Las Vegas, NV positions us at the intersection of sports, entertainment, and technology.
Our team includes world-class designers, engineers, product experts, and finance and operations professionals all focused on one unified mission—connecting people over sports. We believe in fair and equitable pay, transparent communication, and creating an environment where every team member can do the best work of their career.
About the Role: Staff Software Engineer – Backend
We're seeking an exceptional Staff Software Engineer - Backend to help us scale the core systems behind our fantasy sports and Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) offerings. This is not just another backend engineering role—this is an opportunity to serve as a senior technical leader who will drive architectural decisions, build mission-critical backend services, and mentor fellow engineers as we scale to support tens of millions of passionate sports fans.
As a staff-level engineer at Sleeper, you'll be empowered with significant autonomy and ownership. You'll collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, designers, and frontend engineers to bring innovative features to life—from real-time contest engines and complex game logic to personalized content delivery and secure, seamless payment systems. You'll own major parts of the backend stack and help define what "great" looks like in terms of performance, scalability, and reliability at Sleeper.
The Technical Landscape
Our backend infrastructure powers millions of concurrent users engaging with real-time fantasy contests, live scoring updates, instant notifications, and seamless social interactions. The systems you'll build and scale must handle enormous traffic spikes during major sporting events, maintain sub-second latency for live updates, and ensure absolute reliability when users are competing for real money.
This role offers the rare opportunity to work on genuinely challenging technical problems at scale—distributed systems coordination, real-time data processing, high-throughput transaction handling, and building resilient architectures that never let users down during the most critical moments of their fantasy experience.
What You'll Do: Core Responsibilities
Design and Build Core Backend Systems
You'll architect and implement the fundamental backend systems that power Sleeper's games and real-time user experiences. This includes fantasy contests with live scoring and updates, Sleeper Picks with instant result resolution, user profiles with rich social features, dynamic leaderboards with real-time rankings, notification systems that deliver timely alerts, and much more. Your work will be at the heart of what makes Sleeper special—the systems that users interact with every single day.
Architect Scalable, Distributed Systems
Design and build distributed systems capable of gracefully handling millions of concurrent users with consistently low latency and exceptionally high availability. You'll make critical decisions about system architecture, data partitioning strategies, caching layers, database sharding, message queue implementations, and service-to-service communication patterns. Your architectural choices will directly impact our ability to scale and deliver an exceptional user experience as we grow.
Lead Backend Initiatives End-to-End
Take ownership of major backend initiatives from initial concept through production deployment and ongoing optimization. You'll be responsible for ensuring clean interfaces between services, comprehensive documentation that enables team velocity, resilient infrastructure that handles failures gracefully, and monitoring systems that provide visibility into system health. You'll think through edge cases, plan for failure scenarios, and build systems that operators can trust.
Optimize System Performance
Proactively identify and address performance bottlenecks before they impact users. You'll implement comprehensive monitoring and alerting systems, conduct regular profiling to understand resource utilization, perform capacity planning to stay ahead of growth, and optimize critical paths to deliver the fastest possible experience. You'll use data-driven approaches to identify opportunities for improvement and measure the impact of optimizations.
Collaborate Cross-Functionally
Work closely with product managers to understand user needs and business requirements, collaborate with designers to ensure technical feasibility of proposed experiences, partner with frontend engineers to design efficient APIs and data contracts, and coordinate with DevOps to ensure smooth deployments and operational excellence. You'll be a bridge between technical implementation and product vision, helping translate user needs into technical requirements and technical constraints into product decisions.
Mentor Engineers and Shape Culture
Provide thoughtful, constructive code reviews that elevate code quality and help engineers grow their skills. Mentor engineers at various experience levels, sharing your expertise and helping them develop their technical judgment. Shape backend engineering best practices, establish coding standards, improve development workflows, and contribute to technical documentation. You'll be a role model for engineering excellence and help establish the culture of the engineering organization.
Drive Technical Direction and Innovation
Serve as a key engineering voice at the leadership level, influencing technical strategy and architectural direction for the entire backend organization. Evaluate new technologies and approaches, advocate for important technical investments, and help balance innovation with pragmatism. You'll have the opportunity to shape not just what we build, but how we build it and what technical capabilities we develop as an organization.
Who You Are: Ideal Candidate Profile
Extensive Backend Engineering Experience
You bring 7+ years of backend software engineering experience, including proven experience in staff-level or technical lead roles where you've made significant architectural decisions and influenced engineering culture. You've shipped products at scale, debugged production issues under pressure, and learned valuable lessons from both successes and failures that have shaped your engineering judgment.
Distributed Systems Expertise
You have a proven track record of designing and scaling distributed systems that serve millions of users in real-time or gaming environments. You understand the CAP theorem not just theoretically but practically—you know when to prioritize consistency versus availability, how to handle network partitions gracefully, and how to design systems that maintain correctness even under failure conditions. You've dealt with distributed transactions, eventual consistency, clock synchronization issues, and all the other challenges that come with building truly distributed systems.
Strong Technical Foundation
You possess strong proficiency in one or more modern backend languages such as Go, Python, Node.js, or Java, and you understand the trade-offs between them. You can articulate why you'd choose one language over another for specific use cases, considering factors like performance characteristics, ecosystem maturity, team expertise, and operational requirements. You write clean, maintainable code that others enjoy working with.
Deep Infrastructure Knowledge
You have deep knowledge of both SQL and NoSQL databases, understanding when to use relational databases for transactional consistency versus document stores or key-value stores for scalability and flexibility. You're experienced with caching strategies using technologies like Redis or Memcached, understanding cache invalidation patterns and cache warming strategies. You've worked with message queues like Kafka, RabbitMQ, or Google Pub/Sub, designing event-driven architectures that enable loose coupling and high throughput.
API and Data Modeling Expertise
You're comfortable designing and maintaining RESTful and/or GraphQL APIs that are intuitive for clients to consume, well-documented, properly versioned, and performant. You think carefully about data models, considering access patterns, query performance, data consistency requirements, and future extensibility. You've built internal tooling that improves developer productivity and operational visibility.
Cloud and DevOps Competency
You have hands-on experience with cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or similar, understanding the services they offer and how to use them effectively. You're familiar with containerization using Docker, creating consistent development and production environments. Familiarity with orchestration tools like Kubernetes is a plus, though not required—we value the ability to learn and adapt to new technologies.
Product-Minded Engineering
You possess a strong product mindset—you care deeply about the "why" behind what you're building, not just the "how." You build with users in mind, considering their needs, pain points, and the value that features deliver. You can push back on requirements when appropriate, suggest alternative approaches that might better serve users, and balance technical excellence with pragmatic delivery.
Exceptional Communication and Collaboration
You have excellent communication skills, capable of explaining complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and writing clear documentation that helps the team move faster. You elevate your teammates through collaboration, mentorship, and leading by example. You actively listen to different perspectives, seek to understand before being understood, and build consensus around important decisions.
Bonus Qualifications
Passion for sports, gaming, or building multiplayer or real-time systems is a significant bonus. If you're someone who uses fantasy sports apps, understands the user experience we're trying to create, and can bring that user perspective to your engineering work, that's incredibly valuable. Experience with real-time gaming backends, live scoring systems, or wagering platforms is particularly relevant.
Why Join Sleeper?
Massive Impact on Millions of Users
Your work will directly touch millions of users and help shape the next generation of sports entertainment. Every system you build, every optimization you make, and every architectural decision you drive will impact how millions of passionate sports fans experience their favorite games. This isn't abstract work—it's building systems that create real joy and excitement for real people every single day.
High Ownership and Autonomy
We trust our engineers to make high-leverage decisions and drive meaningful outcomes with significant autonomy. You won't be implementing someone else's detailed specifications—you'll be defining the technical approach, making architectural decisions, and owning the outcomes. With ownership comes responsibility, but also the satisfaction of seeing your decisions and work directly shape the product.
Startup Agility at Scale
Experience the best of both worlds—the agility and speed of a startup with the resources and user base of a scaled company. Move fast, ship often, and see your work in the hands of users quickly. We don't have layers of bureaucracy or months-long approval processes. If you have a good idea and can build it, you can ship it and impact users almost immediately.
Culture-First Team Environment
Join a team of builders, thinkers, and sports lovers who value humility, collaboration, and having fun along the way. We celebrate wins together, support each other through challenges, and maintain a culture where everyone's voice matters regardless of title or tenure. We're competitive about building great products, not competitive with each other. We believe that diverse perspectives make us stronger and that psychological safety enables the best work.
Fast Career Growth Opportunities
In a small, high-performing team, your growth is limited only by your ambition and ability. Outstanding work is highly visible, and there are abundant opportunities to take on increasing responsibility, mentor others, and shape the direction of the engineering organization. We promote from within and invest in helping our team members develop their careers.
Comprehensive Compensation and Benefits
Competitive Salary and Equity
We offer a competitive salary ranging from $225,000 to $300,000 per year, taking into account a wide range of factors including skill sets, experience and training, licensure and certifications, and other business and organizational needs. This base salary is complemented by meaningful equity grants that align your success with the company's success, giving you a real stake in what we're building together.
Health and Wellness Benefits
Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance to ensure you and your family are well taken care of. We believe that great work requires taking care of your health and wellbeing, and our benefits package reflects that commitment.
Retirement Planning
401(k) retirement plan with company matching, helping you plan for your financial future while you're building the future of sports engagement with us.
Work-Life Balance
Generous paid time off (PTO) to rest, recharge, and pursue your interests outside of work. We believe in sustainable pace and know that taking time off makes you more effective when you're working. Additionally, we offer a flexible remote work policy that allows you to work in the environment where you're most productive, whether that's from home, a coworking space, or our offices.
Small, Focused Team Impact
Work in a small, focused team environment where your contributions truly matter and are highly visible. You're not just another engineer lost in a massive organization—you're a key member of a tight-knit team where everyone knows each other and works together toward shared goals.
Our Hiring Philosophy and Commitment to Equity
Sleeper believes passionately in quality over quantity, and intentionally keeps our team small as a result. We've learned from experience that when companies grow too large in size, it has a detrimental effect on both the product quality and the impact any single individual can have. Our lean team structure means every hire matters enormously, and every person plays a critical role in our success.
We believe in fair and equitable pay. The salary range for this role ($225,000 to $300,000 per year) takes into account a wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including, but not limited to, skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs.
Equal Employment Opportunity
The policy of Sleeper is to provide equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, citizenship status, age, national origin, ancestry, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected status and to affirmatively seek to advance the principles of equal employment opportunity.
Sleeper is committed to being an Equal Opportunity Employer and offers opportunities to all job seekers, including job seekers with disabilities. If you are a qualified individual with a disability or a disabled veteran, you may request a reasonable accommodation if you are unable or limited in your ability to use or access the Company's career webpage as a result of your disability. You may request reasonable accommodations by sending an email to jobs@sleeper.app.
Ready to Build the Future of Sports Engagement?
If you're excited about solving complex technical challenges at scale, building systems that millions of people rely on, and working with a passionate team that's redefining sports entertainment, we want to hear from you. This is an opportunity to make a significant impact, work with cutting-edge technologies, and help shape the future of how people connect over sports.
Join us at Sleeper, where your code powers the moments that matter most to sports fans around the world.
Apply now to become our next Staff Software Engineer – Backend.
Sleeper is headquartered in Las Vegas, NV, and backed by Silicon Valley's top investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and Expo.
Equal Opportunity Employer • Remote-Friendly • Sports Technology • Fantasy Sports Platform
