Senior Software Engineer (Ruby on Rails)

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 our consumer-facing app to the services that support millions of members. 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

The Social Experience team builds the backend systems behind profiles, feeds, and other social features that help members create an identity, connect with others, and discover and share activity across PrizePicks.

In this role, you will work across mature Rails systems and a growing set of Go and other purpose-built services. You will evolve existing capabilities, define clear service boundaries, and design new backend systems that can scale with our social experiences.

You will own complex work from technical design through production, translate ambiguous product goals into executable plans, influence technical direction, and elevate the engineers around you. This role is for someone who is comfortable extending a mature Rails codebase while helping shape the services that will support the next generation of social experiences at PrizePicks.

What You’ll Do

• Design and build backend services: Architect and implement performant, scalable, and reliable backend systems, primarily in Rails and in Go where appropriate, supporting high-throughput workloads, complex business logic, and evolving social experiences.
• Evolve service boundaries: Help identify and extract well-scoped capabilities from existing Rails systems, designing clear interfaces and incremental migration paths that preserve reliability and backward compatibility.
• Connect product and data systems: Design reliable data flows between backend services and warehouses such as BigQuery and Snowflake, making derived data available without adding latency or reliability risk to member-facing experiences.
• Own technical delivery: Lead complex initiatives from discovery and technical design through implementation, rollout, monitoring, and iteration. Break work into executable pieces, clarify sequencing and ownership, and keep risks and dependencies visible.
• Drive cross-team execution: Partner closely with Product, Design, QA, Data, Platform, and engineers across domains to resolve ambiguity, coordinate dependencies, and move shared work forward.
• 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 engineers on your team through code reviews, pairing, design discussions, and technical guidance.
• Improve engineering practices: Raise the bar for code quality, testing, observability, deployment, and operational ownership.
• 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
• Experience coordinating technical work across team boundaries and proactively managing dependencies, risks, and changing requirements

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 Docker, Kubernetes, 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:

• You turn ambiguous problems into clear plans, make progress visible, and proactively surface decisions, risks, and dependencies
• You enjoy collaborative problem-solving and are effective at bringing people together, incorporating different perspectives, and building alignment
• You communicate clearly and consistently, translating technical decisions for engineers, partners, and non-technical stakeholders
• You balance deep technical execution with planning, mentorship, reviews, and the broader needs of the team
• You are comfortable operating autonomously in a distributed engineering organization while staying closely connected to teammates and partners

What Makes You Stand Out

• Experience leading the extraction of capabilities from a monolith or evolving systems toward well-defined services
• Experience building social or relationship-driven systems such as feeds, follows, live chat, reactions, activity streams, or recommendations
• Experience designing stat-driven profile systems, including aggregations, rollups, and derived metrics at scale
• Experience building social systems for rapid experimentation through feature flags, ranking experiments, or growth loops
• Experience designing graph-shaped data models and fan-out strategies at scale
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across teams and domains while driving shared initiatives to completion
• 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

Where You’ll Live

While we prefer candidates based in Atlanta, we are open to qualified applicants from anywhere in the U.S. and are willing to consider remote candidates. #LI-Remote

Working at PrizePicks

The typical salary range for this position is $175,000 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.

Benefits You’ll Receive

In addition to your great compensation package, full-time employees will be eligible for the following perks:

• 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

You must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.

PrizePicks is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.