Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. PrizePicks is a daily fantasy sports platform building and scaling technology for real-time contests and millions of daily transactions. The Senior Back End Engineer will design, build, and operate backend services across Ruby on Rails and Go, support the migration from a monolith to microservices, own complex features end-to-end, and mentor engineers on the Back Office team.
Responsibilities
- Build and own backend services: Design and implement features across both Rails-based services and Go microservices — from API contracts through deployment and monitoring
- Support the migration to microservices: Help decompose the Rails monolith into well-scoped, independently deployable services, contributing to architectural decisions about what to extract and how
- Power internal tooling APIs: Build and maintain the backend APIs that Back Office operators depend on for real-time decisioning — projection management, risk dashboards, alerting, and member operations
- Own technical delivery: Lead the design and implementation of complex features end-to-end, from product requirements through production deployment
- Drive system reliability: Diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks, optimize database queries, and improve resilience of backend systems under load
- Define technical direction: Propose and drive architectural decisions for your team's services, evaluating tradeoffs and communicating recommendations clearly to engineers and stakeholders
- Mentor and elevate: Provide hands-on mentorship to Software Engineers I, II, and III through code reviews, pairing, and technical guidance
- Improve engineering practices: Advocate for and improve best practices around code quality, testing, observability, and deployment for the team
- Collaborate cross-functionally: Work closely with Product Managers, QA, and other engineering teams to translate operational goals into well-scoped technical solutions
- Participate in on-call rotation: Share responsibility for production incidents, contributing to root cause analysis and long-term reliability improvements
Skills
- 5–8 years of professional software engineering experience, with meaningful production time in both Ruby on Rails and Go
- Proven track record of owning and delivering complex, multi-component features in a team environment
- Experience working across monolith-to-microservices migrations, extracting services, managing dual-write patterns, and maintaining backward compatibility
- Experience designing and operating distributed systems or event-driven architectures
- Strong Rails proficiency — you understand the framework deeply, write idiomatic Ruby, and know when to leverage or work around Rails conventions
- Strong Go proficiency — you write idiomatic, well-tested, production-quality Go code
- Solid PostgreSQL skills, including schema design, query optimization, and performance tuning
- Solid understanding of API design (REST and/or gRPC) and service boundary design
- Experience with asynchronous workflows — background job processing (Sidekiq or similar), message queues, or event streaming
- Experience with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes)
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation
- Understanding of observability practices — logging, metrics, tracing
- Comfortable working autonomously with minimal direction on ambiguous problems
- Effective communicator who can articulate technical decisions to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
- Able to context-switch between deep technical work and collaborative planning
- Experience working in a fully remote engineering organization
- We are open to qualified applicants from anywhere in the U.S. and are willing to consider remote candidates
- You must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time
- Hands-on experience with event-driven architectures using Pulsar, Kafka, or similar — our platform relies heavily on async messaging between services
- Experience with NATS request/reply or JetStream patterns
- Familiarity with internal tooling or operator-facing platforms (not just member-facing products)
- Experience in high-traffic, real-time systems — sports, gaming, fintech, or adtech
- Familiarity with infrastructure tooling (Terraform, Kubernetes, ArgoCD)
- Experience in the daily fantasy sports or sports betting industry
- Experience leveraging AI-assisted development tools across the development lifecycle — coding, planning, scoping, and code review
- Experience integrating AI tooling into engineering workflows to accelerate team productivity
Benefits
- Company-subsidized medical, dental, & vision plans
- 401(k) plan with company match
- Annual bonus
- Flexible PTO to encourage a healthy work/life balance (2 weeks STRONGLY encouraged!)
- Generous paid leave programs, including 16-week paid parental leave and disability benefits
- Workplace flexibility and modern work schedules focused on getting the job done, not hours clocked
- Company-wide in-person events and team outings
- Lifestyle enhancement program
- Company equipment provided (Windows & Mac options)
- Annual performance reviews with opportunities for growth and career development
Company Overview