[Hiring] Senior Back End Engineer @PrizePicks

Role Description

We are seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer with deep expertise in Ruby on Rails to join our Checkout & Gameplay team. In this role, you will design, build, and own critical Rails-based backend services that power PrizePicks’ core platform, including our checkout, game types, and validation services. 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.

Qualifications

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Benefits

• Company-subsidized medical, dental, & vision plans.
• 401(k) plan with company match.
• Annual bonus.
• Flexible PTO to encourage a healthy work/life balance (2 weeks STRONGLY encouraged!).
• Generous paid leave programs, including 16-week paid parental leave and disability benefits.
• Workplace flexibility and modern work schedules focused on getting the job done, not hours clocked.
• 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.