Senior Python Engineer, DataFeed Team
Fliff unpacks sports gaming into social, free-to-play games for all types of sports fans. We've built a social sports gaming experience that allows users to compete for leaderboard positioning, to achieve badges and build their status within the game.
We are pioneering play-for-fun sports gaming, with our flagship social sportsbook experience that includes sweepstakes promotions and loyalty rewards. We provide sports fans with fun, engaging, and free-to-play alternatives to real money gaming.
Fliff is building sports gaming and entertainment products for a fast-moving, highly engaged audience. Behind every market, event, contest, player prop, and in-app experience is a data platform that needs to be accurate, reliable, and fast.
The DataFeed Team owns the systems that bring external sports data into Fliff : ingesting feeds, normalizing provider-specific formats, validating data quality, and making that data available to the rest of the platform.
About The Role
We are looking for a Senior Python Engineer to help us build and evolve the core systems behind Fliff ’s sports data platform.
This is not a generic backend role. You will work close to the domain: sports events, leagues, teams, players, markets, odds, scores, schedules, and provider-specific edge cases. You will help make sure our data is correct, timely, observable, and resilient when external feeds behave unpredictably.
You’ll join a squad where engineering decisions have direct product impact. The systems you build will support real-time experiences across Fliff and help our teams move faster with confidence.
What You’ll Do
- Design, build, and maintain Python services for sports data ingestion, transformation, and distribution
- Integrate with third-party sports data providers and handle differences between provider models, formats, and update patterns
- Build reliable pipelines for near real-time and batch data processing
- Improve data validation, reconciliation, monitoring, alerting, and replay tooling
- Work on domain models for events, competitions, participants, markets, odds, scores, and related sports entities
- Investigate production issues, trace data problems, and improve system observability
- Collaborate with backend, product, trading, QA, and platform teams to deliver dependable data flows
- Contribute to architecture decisions, code reviews, technical standards, and mentoring within the squad
What We're Looking For
- 5+ years of strong production experience with Python
- Experience designing and operating backend services in production
- Solid Django experience (not necessarily expert level), with asynchronous programming skills (asyncio)
- Production experience with Apache Kafka
- Solid understanding of APIs, distributed systems, async processing, and data pipelines
- Strong SQL skills and experience with relational databases, especially PostgreSQL
- Experience integrating with external APIs, feeds, or third-party data providers
- Ability to reason carefully about data correctness, edge cases, and failure modes
- Experience with monitoring, logging, alerting, and debugging production systems
- A senior ownership mindset: you can break down ambiguous problems, make pragmatic technical decisions, and communicate clearly
- Strong problem-solving skills and comfort doing code reviews
- Willingness to participate in on-call rotations
Nice To Have
- Experience in sports betting, gaming, fantasy sports, sports data, fintech, trading, or other real-time data domains
- Experience with Django, Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL, or similar technologies
- Experience with Go / Golang , especially for high-throughput backend services, data processing, or performance-sensitive systems
- Experience with event-driven architecture or message queues
- Experience building data validation, reconciliation, or replay systems
- Cloud, Docker, Kubernetes, or infrastructure-as-code experience
- Interest in using AI-assisted engineering tools