Senior Software Engineer, Data

PlayOn Sports is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to develop AI-powered, data-driven services and features for web experiences used by millions of high school sports fans. This role involves collaborating with product and engineering teams to shape sports data and build systems that enhance user experiences.

Responsibilities:

• Ship AI-powered, data-driven features and experiences grounded in PlayOn’s data
• Build, maintain, and improve APIs and backend services
• Design and evolve data schemas and APIs that make our sports data accessible to both application code and LLM-driven features
• Drive technical decisions for the features you ship, and contribute to performance and operational health across the application
• Establish eval and observability practices for AI features so regressions are caught in CI rather than by users
• Develop modern backend services using C# .NET, Python, SQL, AWS, and Snowflake
• Build LLM-powered features against PlayOn’s data, connecting models to Postgres, Snowflake, and internal APIs via retrieval, tool use, and semantic search
• Model and evolve data schemas so they serve both traditional APIs and AI-driven access patterns
• Own features end-to-end: architecture and design, implementation, testing, observability, and operational readiness
• Plan and execute backend migrations, platform upgrades, and modernization initiatives with minimal risk
• Optimize and monitor PostgreSQL workloads, including query performance, indexing, and database health trends
• Define and maintain eval suites for production AI features (retrieval quality, answer accuracy, and regression detection) wired into CI

Requirements:

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including backend web application development
• Experience building production features backed by LLMs, such as RAG, semantic/vector search, or tool use / function calling
• Hands-on experience with cloud data warehouses (Snowflake or similar)
• Strong expertise in C# .NET, Python, SQL, REST API design, and data modeling
• Working knowledge of AWS for deploying and operating backend services
• Experience building eval frameworks for AI systems, including golden sets, LLM-as-judge, and regression detection, applied to production AI features and/or agentic dev workflows
• Solid PostgreSQL experience, including schema design, query tuning, and modeling data for both transactional and analytical/AI access patterns
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and Git/GitHub workflows
• Ability to work effectively in a collaborative, agile, team-oriented environment
• Bachelor's in Computer Science or equivalent experience preferred
• Frontend development experience
• Proficiency with load testing, observability, and reliability engineering practices
• Experience working on high-traffic public-facing websites
• Experience with vector databases or vector search
• Experience exposing data and tools to LLMs via function calling, MCP, or agent frameworks
• Knowledge of or interest in sports, sports management, and statistics