Senior / Staff Backend Software Engineer (Fantasy Sports)
Company: Sleeper
Location: San Francisco, New York City, California, New York, United States {{REMOTE}}
Salary: $180k - $300k per year
Type: Full-time
Posted: 2026-10-01
About this role
- 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
### Benefits
- Team outing every quarter and company retreat once a year
- Regular virtual game-time with the team with company-sponsored snacks
- Unlimited Vacations
- 401k and health insurance
- Company-sponsored fantasy leagues with real prizes- 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 ...