Lead Services Engineer (R&D)

About Skillz

Skillz is driving the future of entertainment by accelerating the convergence of sports, video games and media for an exploding mobile-first audience worldwide. The company’s platform empowers mobile game developers and players with democratized access to fun, fair and skill-based competition for real prizes, shifting the paradigm to make eSports accessible to anyone, anywhere with a mobile device.

Skillz helps developers build multi-million dollar game franchises by turning content into competitive social gaming properties for the world’s 2.6 billion gamers. The company has already worked with 13,000 game developers, leveraging its patented technology to host over 800 million tournaments for 18 million players worldwide.

This year, Skillz was recognized as one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies and CNBC Disruptor 50 (for the second time). In 2018, Skillz was listed as one of Forbes’ Next Billion-Dollar Startups and Entrepreneur Magazine’s 100 Brilliant Companies. In 2017, Inc. Magazine ranked Skillz the No. 1 fastest-growing private company in America.

The company is backed by leading venture capitalists, media companies, and professional sports luminaries, ranging from Liberty Global, Accomplice, Wildcat Capital, Telstra Ventures, and a founder of Great Hill Partners to the owners of the New England Patriots, Milwaukee Bucks, New York Mets, and Sacramento Kings.

What we’re looking for:

Our Research and Development department sets the vision for the future of the Skillz player experience in new arenas and the Hardware team is the latest addition. Skillz is a mobile social gaming platform where players compete for real prizes. We build a player experience that is visually rich with tournaments, chat, leaderboards, payments and customer support. You and the Hardware team will build the physical representation of the Skillz brand by bringing new types of gameplay to millions of players through the development of a variety of hardware projects.

What you'll do:

• Master the entire application life-cycle including research, design, development, testing, along with continuous deployment and delivery
• Develop and maintain complex, highly available, distributed, cloud-based solutions
• Add new features to our world-class platform enabling competitions, tournaments and social features for players, spectators and streamers around the world
• Work with related engineering teams, SDKs, and 3rd party partners to deliver projects from prototype to deployment.
• Implement your own suggestions to change the Skillz ecosystem
• Execute on R&D projects to push forward the range of content offered on the Skillz platform

Your Skillz:

• 5+ years of software development experience working on large-scale distributed systems with Java or Node
• Experience with cloud-based datastore technologies such as RDS, Redis, DynamoDB, and ElasticSearch including design and optimization
• Experience building Spring based RESTful web services a plus
• Experience with AWS or other cloud provider is a huge plus
• Familiarity with DB ORM (Jooq or Hibernate) and caching frameworks (Caffeine or Guava) is a nice to have

Skillz embraces diversity and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. As part of our commitment to diversifying our workforce, we do not discriminate on the basis of age, race, sex, gender, gender identity, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, marital status, citizenship, veteran status, or disability status.