About Us
Launched from a Stanford dorm room, Team Rankings has evolved from a math geek’s passion project into a profitable and growing business. Sports fans worldwide rely on our models, tools, and stats to analyze the games they love and make winning decisions in betting, pools, and fantasy.
Without raising any VC funding, we've built three consumer brands (TeamRankings, BetIQ, and PoolGenius) that attract over 11 million annual website visitors and 10,000+ paying subscribers. We also work with industry leaders like ESPN, FanDuel, and The Action Network.
Job Description
We are seeking an experienced Technical Lead to build out our next generation of products and provide strategic guidance on a range of technology matters. This newly created senior level position will report directly to our CEO. Although full-stack technology expertise is ideal for this role, back end and data engineering skills are most important.
This position offers a unique opportunity to run point for a lean and efficient engineering team with a proven track record of building innovative and successful products. You will get to immerse yourself in statistics, algorithms, and predictive models as you deliver experiences that delight millions of sports fans, and you will accelerate the growth of our business by designing scalable technical infrastructure.
As our Technical Lead, you will play the role of player-coach as we expand our engineering operation, which currently consists of two full-time developers. At least 75% of your time will be spent as an individual contributor, coding and engaging in hands-on technical projects.
You will spend the balance of your time applying your broad engineering expertise to level up our technical strategy, infrastructure, systems, and team. For example, we will expect you to proactively take the lead in:
- Auditing and upgrading our tech stack
- Determining how to best leverage AI in engineering workflows
- Refining our product development and QA processes
- Assisting fellow engineers via code reviews and mentoring
Best of all, you'll join a talented team that loves what they do, has fun at work, and gets paid to think about sports, betting, and data.
Primary Responsibilities
- Work with product and marketing leads to clarify requirements, prioritize development projects, and negotiate deadlines
- Productize data models for various applications (e.g. sports, products, marketing, business intelligence)
- Architect scalable and performant solutions for ingesting, structuring, manipulating, and maintaining large datasets
- Scope, plan, and implement complex engineering projects on-time and with high quality code
- Help monitor and maintain our technical infrastructure, while identifying opportunities to improve reliability, performance, and security
- Conduct 'build vs. buy' analyses for software services across the value chain and integrate third-party solutions as prudent
- Debug complicated code and resolve unanticipated technical issues that arise during product development and daily operations
- Help drive the adoption of technologies and processes that improve the productivity and output quality of our engineering team
- Assist in developing a technical hiring plan and participate in the recruiting and screening of future engineering candidates
Designing a clever approach to evolve our existing tech stack as we continue to serve millions of users will be an important facet of this job. Our current platform is a traditional LAMP stack: Linux, Apache, MariaDB, PHP, and the Smarty template language. We also currently use Python and Java on the back end; HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on the front end; and AWS as our server infrastructure.
Potential Future Projects
As a senior engineer on a small and fast-moving team, you will play a role in developing a wide range of user-facing functionality and behind-the-scenes infrastructure. Here are some examples of projects you might lead within your first 6-12 months on the job:
- Showcase applications of AI tools within high-priority projects
- Develop an iterative plan to modernize our tech stack/architecture
- Work with marketing leads on user acquisition and retention tests
- Integrate new data providers and expand our statistical coverage
- Design and implement systems to monitor and improve data integrity
- Launch new sports (e.g. NHL, PGA, WNBA) including data and models
- Develop features that use real-time data (e.g. live scores or odds)
- Build personalization features that let users customize data views
- Enhance internal reporting around sales, customer, and usage data
- Build a public API for our proprietary rankings and predictions
- Test third-party services for machine learning and predictive modeling
- Productize player-level predictive models for NFL, NBA, and/or PGA
Desired Qualifications & Traits
- Broad technical expertise spanning software design and development (web and mobile), AI tools, databases and data management, cloud-based server environments, security, performance tuning, APIs, statistical programming languages, front-end development languages, and UI frameworks
- Productive engineer who sets an example by getting stuff done, delivering great work, and achieving aggressive goals
- Demonstrated ability to improve upon existing code and infrastructure by refactoring or integrating new technologies
- Enough of a quantitative background to work with data scientists to implement and refine sophisticated data models they design
- Strong problem-solving and debugging skills, including the ability to think clearly and resolve issues in high-pressure situations
- Pragmatic approach to development, prioritizing customer and business value over theoretically perfect solutions
- Ability to quickly evaluate technical decisions and concisely present recommendations to non-technical stakeholders
- Approachable team player eager to share knowledge, provide respectful constructive feedback, and improve the quality and efficiency of our engineering org
- Passion for sports analytics, betting, pools, and fantasy sports
Providing tangible examples of your skills and achievements relevant to this role will be the best way to distinguish yourself as a candidate.
Ideally, you've already proven yourself as a resourceful high performer on a small engineering team, in an environment that forced you to wear many hats and quickly become proficient in new technical domains.
Culture & Values
Our close-knit team, startup-like work environment, and execution-focused operating philosophy are the key drivers of our success. So they also need to be a great fit for you.
We encourage you to read more about working at Team Rankings, including the personal traits we value most and what we expect from all employees, on our website.
Benefits & Perks
We're committed to prioritizing employee happiness and well-being, supporting the individual needs of every team member, and generously rewarding top performers. At Team Rankings you will enjoy:
- Salary at the top end of industry norms
- Significant performance-based bonuses
- Remote work (live wherever you want)
- High degree of work schedule flexibility
- No pre-set limits on vacation or time off
- Personalized health insurance options
- Retirement plan with company matching
- Computer and office equipment budget
- Reimbursement for high-speed Internet
- Periodic team meetups in fun destinations
- Random, fun rewards like a surprise King Cake delivery during Mardi Gras or a DoorDash budget during a busy period
How to Apply
We only accept applications via our online process. Click the Apply To Position button on this page to apply for this job.
The application process includes a short questionnaire that helps give us an initial sense of your likely fit for our company and culture.
In order to evaluate your skills and relevant experience, we also request a resumé, a link to your LinkedIn and/or GitHub profile, and a cover letter in which you should explain the following three things:
- What about this role most interests you
- How this role fits your ideal career path
- An accomplishment (personal or professional) that makes you proud
Interview Process & Start Date
We plan to fill this position as quickly as feasible, and will review candidates as they apply. Our evaluation process will likely include the following steps:
- Application (15 mins, online)
- 1st round interview (60 mins, video call)
- Take-home project (2-3 hrs, online)
- 2nd round interviews (2-4 hrs, video calls)
- Final interview with CEO (1-3 hrs, video call or in person)
We aim to respond via email to all applications, within two weeks of submission. So please be patient within that time frame.
Thank you for your interest, and if you can knock the ball out of the park as our Technical Lead, we can't wait to hear from you!
Team Rankings, LLC is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender, gender identity, gender expression, color, national origin, pregnancy, ancestry, domestic partner status, disability, sexual orientation, age, genetic predisposition, medical condition, marital status, citizenship status, military or veteran status, or any other basis covered by applicable law.