Remote Backend Engineer - Risk & Trading

Description:

• Sleeper is a rapidly growing platform for sports fans with messaging and gameplay at its core.
• This role will focus on Python services that integrate tightly with Elixir, GCP, and distributed databases.
• You will collaborate with product, data, and frontend teams to ship user-facing features that are fair, fast, and resilient.
• Responsibilities include designing and implementing Python backend services for real-time risk management and trading operations.
• You will build scalable infrastructure for pricing engines, market creation, settlement, and exposure management.
• The role involves integrating with Elixir services via gRPC/REST, Kafka, and Redis to ensure consistency and low-latency performance.
• You will architect distributed systems on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) using Pub/Sub, Cloud Run/Kubernetes, and BigQuery.
• Developing robust monitoring, alerting, and CI/CD pipelines to ensure high availability and quick incident response is essential.
• You will collaborate with data scientists on model deployment and optimize end-to-end latency from pricing to settlement.
• The position requires owning projects from ideation through production, making thoughtful trade-offs in ambiguous, high-stakes environments.

Requirements:

• Candidates must have 4+ years of backend engineering experience with a strong focus on Python (FastAPI, Django, or similar).
• A proven ability to design and operate distributed systems handling high throughput and low latency is required.
• Experience with message queues/streams (Apache Kafka, Google Pub/Sub) and caching layers (Redis) is necessary.
• Candidates should be comfortable interacting with Elixir/Erlang or other functional stacks, or eager to learn.
• A pragmatic engineering mindset that critically considers edge cases and failure modes, especially in financial or real-time systems, is essential.
• The ideal candidate should be calm, methodical, and communicative during incidents, thriving under pressure.
• Preferred skills include prior work with ScyllaDB/Cassandra or other wide-column distributed databases.
• Familiarity with Rust, Go, or C++ for high-performance components is a plus.
• Knowledge of risk modeling, market-making algorithms, or sports-betting infrastructure is beneficial.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, GitLab CI, and infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform) is desired.
• A deep understanding of observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry is advantageous.

Benefits:

• The position offers a competitive salary and stock options.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance is provided.
• A 401(k) plan is available for employees.
• Flexible working hours and remote work options are offered.
• There are opportunities for career advancement within the company.