Senior Back End Engineer
Senior backend engineer building and migrating services in Ruby on Rails and Go for PrizePicks' internal Back Office platform. Owns complex features end-to-end, drives microservices migration, mentors engineers, and participates in on-call.
About the job
What You'll Do
- 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.
What You Have
Experience:
- 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
Technical Skills:
- 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
Working Style:
- 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
What Makes You Stand Out
- 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
Compensation & Benefits
- Typical salary range: $175,000 to $185,000
- Company-subsidized medical, dental, & vision plans
- 401(k) plan with company match
- Annual bonus
- Flexible PTO (2 weeks strongly encouraged)
- Generous paid leave programs, including 16-week paid parental leave and disability benefits
- Workplace flexibility and modern work schedules
- 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
Skills
Ruby on Rails, Go, Postgres, REST APIs, gRPC, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Sidekiq, Kafka, Pulsar, Terraform, Argo CD, Observability
Similar jobs
Backend Engineering jobsSenior backend engineer responsible for rebuilding usage-based and token-based billing infrastructure, including pricing, metering, reconciliation, and invoicing systems. Requires 5+ years of Python or Go backend experience and familiarity with distributed systems and billing platforms.
Build and operate scalable Ruby on Rails backend services for a high-traffic fantasy sports platform. The role requires 5–8 years of software engineering experience, strong PostgreSQL and API design skills, and ownership of complex systems and technical delivery.
Senior software engineer responsible for revenue-critical backend systems spanning account lifecycle management, metering, billing, integrations, and customer-facing usage transparency. The role requires strong distributed-systems experience, Go or comparable backend expertise, and operational ownership.
Leads the Cloud team developing booking, orchestration, APIs, billing, monitoring, and data-delivery systems for a global antenna network. The role requires substantial software development and cloud-services experience, technical leadership, and expertise in distributed systems.
Senior software engineer building core platform components, developer tools, and reliability capabilities that improve engineering productivity. Requires 4+ years of software engineering experience, cloud or platform exposure, and strong knowledge of databases, distributed systems, observability, and production reliability.