Site Reliability Engineer

At Underdog, we make sports more fun.

Our thesis is simple: build the best products and we’ll build the biggest company in the space, because there’s so much more to be built for sports fans. We’re just over five years in, and we’re one of the fastest-growing sports companies ever, most recently valued at $1.3B. And it’s still the early days.

We’ve built and scaled multiple games and products across fantasy sports, sports betting, and prediction markets, all united in one seamless, simple, easy to use, intuitive and fun app. 

Underdog isn’t for everyone. One of our core values is give a sh*t. The people who win here are the ones who care, push, and perform. If that’s you, come join us.

Winning as an Underdog is more fun.

This is a rare opportunity to be a founding SRE at Underdog, helping define how reliability, scalability, and operational excellence work as the company continues to grow. You’ll operate in exploration mode early on, identifying the highest-leverage reliability challenges and shaping our approach to incident response, observability, and SLOs. This is a high-impact role with real ownership from day one, partnering closely with platform, infrastructure, and product teams to ensure Underdog scales through peak traffic, game-day spikes, and rapid iteration while improving both system reliability and developer experience.

About the role

• Own and maintain the incident response process, including defining procedures, tools, and best practices
• Guide teams in establishing and monitoring Service Level Objectives (SLOs), including setting up alerts and reporting systems
• Lead capacity planning initiatives, focusing on both short and long-term scalability while optimizing costs
• Develop and implement disaster recovery plans, including regular testing and regulatory compliance
• Collaborate with teams on architecture decisions to ensure high availability and scalability
• Manage launch and event planning for high-traffic occasions, focusing on infrastructure preparation and capacity management (a.k.a. Launch Readiness)
• Act as an internal expert and consultant for monitoring tools like Datadog and Pagerduty and infrastructure like AWS and Kubernetes
• Emphasis on automation and tooling to scale our workload
• Contribute across codebases in Ruby, Python, Go, TypeScript, Swift, and Kotlin as needed to support the initiatives described above.

Who you are

• A strong written and verbal communicator
• Collaborative by nature
• Someone who enjoys using research, data, and experiments to make decisions; you believe “Hope is not a strategy.”
• You enjoy working directly with customers (generally engineers or other people inside the company)
• You think long-term about what is best for the business and its customers
• You are excited to take ownership
• You are very comfortable around an IDE, working with multiple languages, multiple web application frameworks, AWS services, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL
• You can work independently to learn new languages/technologies as needed
• You enjoy deploying changes to production quickly, multiple times a week if necessary

Even better if you have

• Experience with PostgreSQL SQL query optimization, tweaking autovacuum settings, table statistics, different index types, etc.
• Experience with Redis / Valkey Optimization
• Experience with Datadog or similar observability tools 
• Experience working as a web application developer, frontend or backend, especially in React and Ruby on Rails
• Experience with AWS cost optimization
• Read the Google SRE books or similar books, or have other forms of SRE training
• Actively leveraging the capabilities of AI to augment abilities and gain knowledge about interested domains

Our target starting base salary range for this position is between $160,000 and $240,000, plus pre-IPO equity.  Our comp range reflects the full scale of expected compensation for this role. Offers are calibrated based on experience, skills, impact, and geographies. Most new hires land in the lower half of the band, with the opportunity to advance toward the upper end over time.

What we can offer you:

• Unlimited PTO (we're extremely flexible with the exception of the first few weeks before & into the NFL season)
• 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave
• Home office stipend
• A connected virtual first culture with a highly engaged distributed workforce
• 5% 401k match, FSA, company paid health, dental, vision plan options for employees and dependents