Job Specifications
About Fantasy Life
Founded by the “Godfather of Fantasy Sports,” Matthew Berry, Fantasy Life is a fast-growing sports media and gaming company built for passionate fans who want to win.
We deliver industry-leading content, tools, and data across fantasy sports, sports betting, and daily fantasy contests, all powered by a roster of world-class creators and experts. In 2024, Fantasy Life expanded its portfolio with the acquisition of Guillotine Leagues, a unique fantasy football platform that combines skill-based gaming with a thrilling, season-long elimination format. Together, Fantasy Life and Guillotine Leagues give fans a one-stop destination for both consuming the best fantasy content and playing innovative fantasy games, including real-money contests and unique game modes.
From cutting-edge data tools and draft preparation resources to live streams, newsletters, and proprietary gaming experiences, Fantasy Life is committed to delivering the competitive edge fans need, while fostering a vibrant, engaged community that lives and breathes sports.
About The Role
Fantasy Life, home to industry-leading fantasy sports content, data tools, and the innovative Guillotine Leagues fantasy platform, is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer who’s passionate about building elegant, scalable systems in Golang, knows their way around PostgreSQL, and feels at home in AWS. If designing backend services that feel clean, fast, and future-friendly makes you happy - you’re our kind of person.
You’ll join a friendly, ambitious organization that moves quickly, collaborates openly, and isn’t afraid to have a little fun while solving hard problems. You’ll own major parts of our platform and help shape how we build, deploy, and scale our services, working with external technology partners to deliver great features our customers love.
What You'll Do
Design and build robust, high-performance backend services using Golang
Own the design and implementation of data ingestion pipelines - batch and streaming
Build reliable data transformation and enrichment workflows
Architect and optimize data models, queries, and workflows using PostgreSQL (including performance tuning, migrations, and schema design)
Build and maintain cloud-native services in AWS (ECS, Lambda, SQS, RDS/Aurora, and more)
Collaborate with product, design, and DevOps to deliver features end-to-end
Improve our APIs, developer experience, and service reliability
Champion best practices around code quality, testing, architecture, and documentation
Collaborate with external engineering teams, provide constructive code reviews, drive engineering discipline and help shape our engineering culture
Help us move fast - thoughtfully - while keeping systems stable and scalable
Qualifications
5 - 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
Strong experience building production systems in Golang
Deep hands-on experience with PostgreSQL, including query optimization and schema design
Experience building ETL pipelines, data modeling and transformations
Solid understanding of AWS services and cloud-native development patterns
Practical experience utilizing AI tooling to create leverage and improve throughput such coding assistants, agents and testing tools
Experience with event-driven architectures (Kafka, SQS, SNS, etc.)
Familiarity with microservices, distributed systems, and scalable architectures
Comfortable working with CI/CD pipelines and containerized environments (Docker, ECS, etc.)
Strong debugging skills, curiosity, and a willingness to jump into complex problems
Excellent communication skills — you enjoy collaborating and lifting others up
Strong Pluses
Experience with real-money platforms, fintech, or transactional systems where downtime has direct financial consequences
Familiarity with SLOs, error budgets, and reliability engineering principles
Intangibles
You feel ownership over what you ship, it's not done until it's running well in production
You're comfortable saying "we shouldn't ship this yet" when reliability is at risk
You write runbooks, not just code
You default to simple, boring technology unless complexity is truly needed
You stay calm under pressure and communicate clearly during incidents