# Senior Back End Engineer

**Company:** [PrizePicks](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/prizepicks)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $175k – $185k/yr
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** Ruby on Rails, Go, Postgres, REST APIs, gRPC, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Sidekiq, Kafka, Pulsar, Terraform, Argo CD, Observability
**Posted:** 2026-06-11

> 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.

## Job Description

## 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

## Similar roles

- [Senior Software Engineer, Cloud Monitoring Service](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/fca599d1-c59d-4114-bd9d-6bd08889ee5e) - Crusoe - San Francisco, CA - $175k – $210k/yr
- [Senior Java Engineer](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/75155370-9026-46f0-a3e1-e6acfa7e6883) - Wowza Media Systems - Remote - $175k – $200k/yr
- [Senior Software Engineer](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/a5a74f08-853f-407e-8f50-8046665e72f0) - PrizePicks - Remote - $175k – $185k/yr
- [Senior Software Engineer, Billing Platform](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/16840172-b537-4bd4-8c1a-4eb47456864c) - Crusoe - San Francisco, CA - $175k – $220k/yr
- [Sr. Software Engineer, Backend](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/7b3c8a4b-9456-43b7-bca2-98be0a77d08a) - Betterment - New York, NY - $175k – $215k/yr

**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/fb56e7fd-79bf-4c31-9507-f65a85f7bcaa
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/fb56e7fd-79bf-4c31-9507-f65a85f7bcaa