[Hiring] Senior Software Engineer @PrizePicks

Role Description

We are seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer with deep expertise in Ruby on Rails to join our Gamification team. In this role, you will design, build, and own critical Rails-based backend services that power PrizePicks’ core platform — including customer rewards, incentives and our loyalty program. 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.
• High level of familiarity with the challenges of large-scale, high-throughput distributed systems and event-driven architecture.

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.

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 in bringing greenfield services from 0 to production.
• Experience with event streaming (Kafka, Pulsar, NATS or similar).
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (Ansible, Helm, Terraform).

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.