Backend Engineer - Risk & Trading

Job Description

Position Overview

Sleeper is a rapidly growing platform for sports fans with messaging and gameplay at its core. This role focuses on Python services that integrate tightly with Elixir, GCP, and our distributed databases. You will collaborate with product, data, and frontend teams to ship user-facing features that are fair, fast, and resilient.

Employment Type: Full-Time Location Type: Remote

What You’ll Be Doing

• Design & implement Python backend services that power real-time risk management and trading operations.
• Build scalable infrastructure for pricing engines, market creation, settlement, and exposure management.
• Integrate with our Elixir services via gRPC/REST, Kafka, and Redis to ensure consistency and low-latency performance.
• Architect distributed systems on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) using Pub/Sub, Cloud Run/Kubernetes, and BigQuery.
• Develop robust monitoring, alerting, and CI/CD pipelines to ensure high availability and quick incident response.
• Collaborate with data scientists on model deployment and optimize end-to-end latency from pricing to settlement.
• Own projects from ideation through production, making thoughtful trade-offs in ambiguous, high-stakes environments.

Who You Are

• 4+ years of backend engineering experience with a strong focus on Python (FastAPI, Django, or similar).
• Proven ability to design and operate distributed systems handling high throughput and low latency.
• Experience with message queues/streams (Apache Kafka, Google Pub/Sub) and caching layers (Redis).
• Comfortable interacting with Elixir/Erlang or other functional stacks, or eager to learn.
• Pragmatic engineer who thinks critically about edge cases and failure modes, especially in financial or real-time systems.
• Calm, methodical, and communicative when incidents occur; you thrive under pressure.

Preferred Skills (Nice to Have)

• Prior work with ScyllaDB/Cassandra or other wide-column distributed databases.
• Familiarity with Rust, Go, or C++ for high-performance components.
• Knowledge of risk modeling, market-making algorithms, or sports-betting infrastructure.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, GitLab CI, and infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform).
• Deep understanding of observability: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry.

Preferred Skills (Not Required)

• Experience with Elixir, ErlangVM, or other functional programming languages.
• Familiarity with ScyllaDB, Cassandra, or other distributed databases.
• Experience in financial systems, market making, or real-money gaming infrastructure.
• Knowledge of risk modeling, pricing engines, or real-time alerting systems.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and stock options.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401(k).
• Flexible working hours and remote work options.
• Opportunities for career advancement.

Company Information

Sleeper believes in quality over quantity, and intentionally keeps our team small. Our team includes designers, engineers, product experts, and finance & operations focused on connecting people over sports. We believe in fair and equitable pay.

Compensation: Competitive salary plus benefits including Medical, Dental, PTO, 401k. The salary range for this role takes into account a wide range of factors including skill sets, experience, training, licensure, certifications, and other business needs.

Equal Employment Opportunity: The policy of Sleeper is to provide equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, sexu...