DraftKings is looking to integrate AI into its core operations to enhance customer experiences, streamline processes, and drive innovation. The company needs to build and scale backend systems that can support real-time, AI-enhanced features for millions of users, requiring expertise in applied machine learning and reinforcement learning.
Requirements
- At least 3 years of professional experience in object-oriented backend development using languages like C, Java, or Python
- Proven experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale in cloud environments such as AWS or GCP
- Experience building data pipelines and backend infrastructure to support ML training, inference, and model evaluation
- Familiarity with reinforcement learning concepts and the ability to reason about reward design, convergence, and real-world tradeoffs
- Proficiency in writing and maintaining automated test suites, including unit, integration, and performance tests for large-scale backend services
- Comfort setting up experimentation or evaluation frameworks to validate AI-driven systems in live environments
Responsibilities
- Design and develop scalable backend systems and APIs that enable real-time, AI-driven features across a high-volume, 24/7 platform
- Build and maintain data pipelines and infrastructure required to train, evaluate, and deploy machine learning and reinforcement learning models
- Implement evaluation frameworks to continuously measure model performance and system behavior, driving improvements with experimentation and metrics
- Work with researchers and data scientists to translate AI concepts, like reward function design and tradeoffs, into performant production-ready systems
- Stay at the forefront of AI/ML innovation, integrating new techniques and tools into backend services with speed and pragmatism
- Deliver high-quality, production-ready code from day one, while continuously tuning systems for performance, reliability, and maintainability
- Own the full software development lifecycle for your services, including design, monitoring, debugging, and long-term support
Other
- Collaborate across disciplines to ensure technical alignment with product goals, mentoring teammates and elevating engineering standards
- Ability to thrive in fast-paced, high-ownership settings, triaging and resolving production issues, shipping features quickly, and optimizing for scale
- Curiosity, adaptability, and a drive to stay current with industry trends in AI, ML engineering, and software architecture
- May be required to obtain a gaming license issued by the appropriate state agency as a condition of employment.
