About the job
Location: This position is remote-friendly, with a preference for candidates located in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York City, or the Pacific Northwest.
About Sleeper
Sleeper is dedicated to uniting sports enthusiasts through engaging games and a vibrant community. As one of the fastest-growing platforms in the fantasy sports and real-money gaming sector, we are revolutionizing the way sports fans interact—whether it’s through season-long leagues, pick’em contests, or dynamic real-time experiences with friends.
Our team is nimble, passionate, and focused on product excellence. We are obsessed with user experience and firmly believe that creating delightful, swift, and dependable products is the key to our growth. Supported by renowned investors in Silicon Valley, including Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst, we are shaping the future of sports engagement.
About the Role
We are searching for a Staff Software Engineer - Backend who will play a crucial role in scaling the foundational systems that support our fantasy sports and Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) offerings. In this position, you will lead architectural decisions, construct essential backend services, and mentor fellow engineers as we expand to accommodate tens of millions of enthusiastic sports fans.
As a senior technical leader, you will work collaboratively across teams to bring innovative features to life—from real-time contest engines and game logic to personalized content and secure, seamless payment systems. You will have the autonomy to take ownership of significant components of the backend stack and help define excellence in performance, scalability, and reliability at Sleeper.
What You’ll Do
Design and develop core backend systems that drive Sleeper's games and real-time user experiences, including fantasy contests, Sleeper Picks, user profiles, leaderboards, and more.
Create scalable, distributed systems that can manage millions of concurrent users with minimal latency and maximum availability.
Lead backend projects from ideation to deployment, ensuring clean interfaces, thorough documentation, and resilient infrastructure.
Enhance system performance and proactively identify bottlenecks through monitoring, profiling, and capacity planning.
Collaborate with product, design, and frontend teams to deliver features that delight our users.
Guide engineers, conduct insightful code reviews, and help develop backend engineering best practices and standards.
Foster innovation, technical direction, and team culture as a vital engineering voice in leadership.
Who You Are
You possess a robust background in backend development, with proficiency in relevant programming languages and frameworks.
You have a strong understanding of system architecture and distributed systems.
You are passionate about creating high-quality user experiences and delivering impactful features.

