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