Backend & Data Engineer - Risk & Trading

About Sleeper

Sleeper is a rapidly growing platform for sports fans with messaging and gameplay at its core. While much of our stack is Elixir-driven, this role bridges Python data services with our Elixir backend, GCP, and distributed analytics stores. You’ll own the data plumbing that powers real-time pricing, risk analytics, and settlement while collaborating across product, data-science, and trading teams.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Design & implement real-time data pipelines (Python, SQLX, BigQuery) that ingest odds, bets, and exposure signals with low latency.

• Build and operate backend micro-services for pricing, settlement, and limit management that expose clean gRPC/REST contracts to our Elixir cluster.

• Architect a feature store that serves models in production and supports ad-hoc analytics with strong data governance.

• Integrate streaming & pub/sub systems (Kafka / Google Pub/Sub) with caching layers (Redis, ScyllaDB) to guarantee consistency under high throughput.

• Harden CI/CD, observability, and incident-response runbooks so data integrity issues surface before they hit users.

• Partner with data scientists to deploy and monitor models end-to-end, from training to online inference.

• Own projects from ideation through production, balancing delivery speed against the safety demands of real-money systems.

Who You Are

• 4+ years of backend and/or data-engineering experience with Python (FastAPI, Django, or similar) plus strong SQL chops.

• Proven track record designing distributed systems that handle high-volume, low-latency workloads.

• Experience with stream processing (Kafka, Pub/Sub, Flink or Beam) and warehouse technologies (BigQuery, Snowflake, or Redshift).

• Comfortable—or eager to learn—Elixir/Erlang and other functional stacks.

• Pragmatic engineer who anticipates edge cases and failure modes in financial or real-time environments.

• Calm, methodical communicator during incidents; you thrive under pressure.

• Preferred Skills (Nice to Have)

• Prior work with ScyllaDB/Cassandra, ClickHouse, or other wide-column / OLAP stores.

• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, GitLab CI, and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).

• Familiarity with Rust, Go, or C++ for ultra-low-latency components.

• Knowledge of risk modeling, market-making algorithms, or sports-betting infrastructure.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and stock options

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance

• 401(k)

• Flexible working hours and remote-first culture

• Clear paths for career growth and leadership

What We Offer

Sleeper keeps its team intentionally small so every engineer has outsized product impact. You’ll work alongside designers, data scientists, and trading experts—all focused on one mission: connecting people through sports. We believe in equitable pay and an inclusive workplace.

Certain U.S. locations require a reasonable estimate of base salary. Compensation will consider skills, experience, and market data. Sleeper is an Equal Opportunity Employer and provides reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities. To learn more, visit sleeper.com.

Competitive salary plus benefits including Medical, Dental, PTO, 401k. Please note that The salary range for this role 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. 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 [email protected].

Headquartered in Las Vegas, NV, Sleeper is backed by Silicon Valley’s top investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and Expa.
To learn more, visit us online at: www.sleeper.com