Senior Back-end Engineer

Job description

ScorePlay is the AI-powered media infrastructure for sports, built to automate the content operations behind the world's biggest sports organizations. We work with **300+ leagues, competitions, teams and broadcasters** – including Ligue 1 and Premier League clubs, NBA and NFL teams, the Tour de France, the Australian Open, and leading bodies like UEFA and FIBA – helping them turn every moment on and off the field **into high-value, structured content**. Our platform brings all their media into one place and makes it effortless to find, edit and share in seconds. **Founded in 2021**, we’re a **50-person** team based between **New York** and **Paris**, growing **2x year over year** with 98% retention. We’ve raised **$20M+** from top investors including Alexis Ohanian and Harry Stebbing’s 20VC and elite athletes like Kevin Durant, Raphaël Varane, Mario Götze, Nico Rosberg and Giannis Antetokounmpo. If you’re **passionate about sports** and thrive in **fast-paced environments** - and you want to help shape how the next generation of fans experience sports, you’re in the right place. We’re on track to become the **global leader in sports media**, and this is definitely the **best time to join our adventure**. ## ⚙️ The role ScorePlay is the platform major sports organizations use to manage, search and share their media, from the second it's captured to the moment it reaches everyone's screen. Most of the industry still runs on manual work: a photographer uploads thousands of shots after the final whistle, an editor scrubs through hours of broadcast footage to cut a single highlight, and someone has to tag it all, find the good moments, and get them to players, sponsors and press, one file at a time. We automate all of it. Our AI recognizes every player and sponsor the moment content lands, live feeds get logged and clipped into highlights while the game is still being played, and the right assets flow automatically to 10,000+ athletes, partners and newsrooms worldwide. At 145M+ minutes of video ingested every month, much of the architecture needed at that scale simply hasn't been built before. That's why we exist. We're hiring a senior backend engineer to lead technical subjects across the platform, which is a rare kind of ownership. You'd set the technical direction of your squad end to end: architecting the systems that process 145M+ minutes of video a month, shaping the roadmap and structural decisions directly with Engineering Leadership, and shipping features that land in the hands of major sports organizations within weeks, not quarters. No layers, and no committees. You design it, you build it, the biggest names in sports use it. ## 🧠 What you'll work on Our clients produce enormous amounts of media every week, and our platform is where all of it lives. Some of the backend problems we tackle include: - Letting users search massive amount of media by asking questions in plain language, instead of digging through tags - Processing video fast enough to matter during a live match - Automating work that entire teams still do by hand today Your day to day: - Lead subjects end to end, from design to production, and run what you ship - Write and defend RFCs when a decision is structural: a new datastore, a message broker, a third-party service - Co-design features with your product manager and technical leadership, and push back on product decisions when you disagree - Help the engineers around you level up, through code reviews, pairing and mentoring ## 🛠 The stack and how we work Golang for services. PostgreSQL, Kafka, Temporal for workflows, OpenSearch, Kubernetes, all on AWS. We use AI heavily (but wisely), in the product and in how we work as engineers. Cross-functional feature teams own their scope from conception to production. Structural decisions go through RFCs. Every week, the whole engineering team gets together to present and debate technical subjects. ## 🧩 What we're looking for - 5+ years of backend experience, with at least 1 year working in Go in production. You know what it takes to keep systems fast and reliable under real load. - Solid experience with web architectures, event-driven systems and data-heavy applications. You've designed systems, not only contributed to them, and you can defend your architectural choices and trade-offs. - Strong ownership: you take subjects from ambiguity to shipped, and you care about what happens after deploy. - Remote from Europe, with a remote-first culture and regular team gatherings. - Bonus: startup experience, or time spent on video or media infrastructure. Ingest pipelines, transcoding, live streaming, high traffic or storage at scale. ## 🏆 Why ScorePlay - The product is technical to its core, and it's what clients pay for. Engineers carry real weight in what gets built and how. - Real scale, real stakes: 145M+ minutes of video ingested every month, and the systems you design now become the foundations the whole platform builds on for years - Your work shows up on match day, used by clubs, leagues and athletes you might already follow - An international team across Europe and the US, with more than 15 nationalities *We know many people hesitate to apply if they don’t meet every single requirement on a job description. If you’re interested in ScorePlay but not sure you tick all the boxes, we’d still love to hear from you, this could be the start of a great long-term collaboration.*