Senior Back End Engineer

Overview

At PrizePicks, we are changing the game in daily fantasy sports. We are a passionate team of innovators dedicated to creating a best-in-class experience for our members. Our engineering team builds and scales the platform that powers our explosive growth, from real-time contest engines to the services that handle millions of daily transactions. We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Social Experience team and help us continue to build the future of fantasy sports.

Job Summary

We are seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer with deep expertise in Ruby on Rails to join our Social Experience team. In this role, you will design, build, and own critical Rails-based backend services that power PrizePicks’ core platform — including social feeds and profiles. You will tackle high-scope, complex technical problems, define the technical path from product idea to production, and mentor engineers across your team and the organization. This is a role for someone who thrives on solving hard backend problems and wants to have a direct impact on a product used by millions.

What You’ll Do

• Design and build backend services: Architect and implement Rails-based services that are performant, scalable, and reliable, supporting high-throughput workloads and complex business logic.
• Own technical delivery: Lead the technical design and implementation of complex features end-to-end — from product requirements through deployment and monitoring.
• Drive system reliability: Diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks, optimize database queries, and improve the 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.
• Mentor and elevate: Provide hands-on mentorship to Software Engineers I, II, and III on your team and in the organization through code reviews, pairing, and technical guidance.
• Improve engineering practices: Define, advocate for, and improve best practices around code quality, testing, observability, and deployment for your team.
• Collaborate cross-functionally: Work closely with Product Managers, Designers, QA, and other engineering teams to translate product 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 significant time building production Ruby on Rails applications
• Proven track record of owning and delivering complex, multi-component features in a team environment
• Experience designing and operating backend systems that handle significant scale and complexity

Technical Skills:

• Expert-level Ruby on Rails proficiency — you understand the framework deeply, write idiomatic Ruby, and know when to leverage or work around Rails conventions
• Strong proficiency with PostgreSQL, including schema design, query optimization, and performance tuning at scale
• Solid understanding of API design — RESTful services, serialization strategies, and versioning
• Experience with background job processing (Sidekiq or similar) and asynchronous workflows
• Experience with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes)
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation
• Understanding of observability practices — logging, metrics, tracing
• Working knowledge of Go — our backend includes significant Go services, and cross-stack capability is valued at this level

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
• Experience working in a fully remote engineering organization
• Able to context-switch between deep technical work and collaborative planning

What Makes You Stand Out

• 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
• Experience building social or relationship-driven systems (feeds, follows, reactions, activity streams, recommendation engine)
• Experience designing stat-driven profile systems (aggregations, rollups, derived metrics) at scale
• Experience building social systems that are designed for rapid experimentation (feature flags, ranking experiments, growth loops)
• Deep understanding of graph-shaped data modeling and fan-out patterns
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction horizontally across teams to ensure cohesive social experiences

Where you’ll live:

• This a remote position anywhere in the US is fine. #LI-REMOTE

Working at PrizePicks:

The typical salary range for this position is $170,000 to $185,000 At PrizePicks, we consider your role, level, and where you'll be working when determining our salary ranges. The compensation info you see on our job postings gives you an idea of the starting pay range for the position. Your actual pay within that range will depend on your specific work location, as well as your skills, experience, and education. Your recruiter will be happy to chat more about the specific pay range for your location and how we arrived at it during the hiring process. 

This application period will remain open for 30 days. We’re committed to finding the best candidate, so this date may be adjusted, and any changes will be reflected in this posting. 

Date Posted: March 02, 2026

First Extension: April 2, 2026

Second Extension: May  2, 2026