DraftKings is looking to leverage AI to enhance customer experiences, streamline operations, and unlock new possibilities. The company needs a Senior Lead Software Engineer to direct engineering teams and influence the product roadmap, focusing on AI platform components and cloud-native services.
Requirements
- 6+ years of experience building distributed systems, APIs, or backend platforms in cloud-native environments.
- Strong proficiency in at least one backend language (e.g., Python, Go, C, or Java) and experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CDK, etc.).
- Familiarity with production-grade AI systems: LLM orchestration, vector databases, embedding models, or safety layers.
- Solid understanding of performance optimization, structured logging, and cost governance in AI or platform contexts.
- Comfort designing systems from scratch as well as iterating on legacy code and architecture.
- Bonus: contributions to open-source projects in the AI space.
Responsibilities
- Take ownership of the design, development, and operations of core AI platform components—ranging from LLM runtime services to vector stores and evaluation harnesses.
- Guide your team and partner teams in building secure, scalable APIs and cloud-native services using Python, Go, or C, and AWS infrastructure.
- Be the first voice for engineering on the systems your team owns—balancing reliability, cost, velocity, and safety.
- Lead design sessions and architecture reviews, ensuring high engineering quality, long-term maintainability, and platform consistency.
- Champion data-driven decision-making: use metrics to prioritize, de-risk, and continuously improve team throughput and platform efficiency.
- Help build a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and continuous improvement.
Other
- Collaborating across teams, informing our business decisions, and creatively finding solutions to all of our scaling challenges.
- Bias for action, ownership mindset, and a collaborative approach to solving ambiguous problems.
- May be required to obtain a gaming license issued by the appropriate state agency as a condition of employment.
