Backend Engineer

At OTTO SPORT AI we're on a mission to revolutionize the way youth sports teams and organizations manage their players, events, and operations. OTTO SPORT brings together club management, league and tournament operations, event ticketing, and athlete recruiting into a single suite of products designed to help teams, local clubs, and multi-league organizations perform at their best – both on and off the field or court.

We’re committed to innovating and constantly raising the bar to stay ahead of the competition and deliver game-changing results. And above all, we take pride in our craftsmanship - each line of code, every campaign, and every customer interaction is an opportunity to perform at our peak. If you’re ready to join a team of all-stars, where empathy, agility, and excellence fuel everything we do, we want you on our squad.

Let’s break records together!

We are growing our Minneapolis team with the addition of a Staff Backend Engineer to work on our core products, including OTTO SPORT and OTTO PILOT, and help shape the foundation for future product integration and expansion. You partner closely with Product, Frontend, and Mobile teams to build secure, scalable, and high-performance backend systems. As a Staff Engineer, you operate at a broad technical scope (systems of services), influence architecture and standards across multiple teams, and lead complex backend initiatives from concept to delivery while mentoring other engineers.

If you love the challenge of building and the idea of learning, embracing and leveraging AI in a purpose-driven company, OTTO SPORT AI is the place for you. You will feel the impact of your work every day in our small, high-performing team being led by sports tech industry veterans. Join us in our Minneapolis headquarters and enjoy a hybrid work model.

This role is not open to visa sponsorship.

• Design and build secure, reliable, and scalable backend services aligned with product goals, customer needs, and internal engineering standards.
• Contribute to initiative planning and technical execution strategy for complex projects.
• Own and evolve the architecture of one or more critical backend domains or service areas.
• Balance short-term product delivery with long-term technical sustainability.
• Solve highly complex technical problems and drive thoughtful experimentation where appropriate.
• Identify and reduce technical debt and systemic inefficiencies within and across service boundaries.
• Establish and advocate for backend patterns and standards that improve engineering velocity, quality, security, system performance, and long-term maintainability.
• Lead design reviews and contribute to cross-team architecture documents.
• Guide backend platform improvements, including shared libraries, data models, infrastructure integrations, and observability best practices.

• Partner with Product, Frontend, and Mobile teams to ensure backend capabilities support cohesive, high-quality user experiences.
• Collaborate with other backend leaders to ensure consistent APIs, shared standards, and reliable integrations.
• Influence technical and product direction within your domains and contribute to broader backend architectural discussions.
• Represent backend engineering in cross-functional planning and initiative discussions.
• Provide technical leadership and mentoring across the team and organization.
• Contribute to hiring, interviewing, and onboarding.
• Foster a culture of ownership, quality, and strong communication.

• Expertise in one or more modern backend languages (Node.js, Python, Java, Ruby, Rust, Go, etc).
• Demonstrated history of delivering and maintaining high-performance backend systems at scale.
• Strong expertise in backend system design, service-oriented architecture, and distributed systems fundamentals.
• Proven capacity to lead cross-team technical initiatives and drive architectural decisions.
• Deep familiarity with data modeling, storage systems, performance optimization, resilience patterns, and observability best practices.
• Solid experience designing and maintaining APIs and service integrations.
• Experience with automated testing at multiple levels (unit, integration, end-to-end).
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and modern backend deployment workflows.
• Exceptional communication skills with a strong commitment to ownership and quality.
• Self-directed, highly organized, and focused on solutions.
• Ability to operate effectively and drive results in ambiguous or evolving problem spaces.
• Experience collaborating with global or multicultural teams.
• Experience with our current tech stack or ability to quickly learn:
  Ruby, Node.js, Sinatra, Rails, Mongo DB, Redis queues, Graph
  
  QL/Apollo, and REST APIs.

OTTO provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, sex (including pregnancy,…