Senior Lead Software Engineer, AI Engineering

At DraftKings, AI is becoming an integral part of both our present and future, powering how work gets done today, guiding smarter decisions, and sparking bold ideas. It’s transforming how we enhance customer experiences, streamline operations, and unlock new possibilities. Our teams are energized by innovation and readily embrace emerging technology. We’re not waiting for the future to arrive. We’re shaping it, one bold step at a time. To those who see AI as a driver of progress, come build the future together.

The Crown Is Yours

DraftKings is growing quickly and we’re looking for a Senior Lead Software Engineer to direct our engineering teams and influence our product roadmap. This is more than a technical position, though. You’ll be collaborating across teams, informing our business decisions, and creatively finding solutions to all of our scaling challenges.

What you’ll do as a Senior Lead Software Engineer, AI Engineering

• Take ownership of the design, development, and operations of core AI platform components—ranging from LLM runtime services to vector stores and evaluation harnesses.
• Guide your team and partner teams in building secure, scalable APIs and cloud-native services using Python, Go, or C#, and AWS infrastructure.
• Be the first voice for engineering on the systems your team owns—balancing reliability, cost, velocity, and safety.
• Lead design sessions and architecture reviews, ensuring high engineering quality, long-term maintainability, and platform consistency.
• Champion data-driven decision-making: use metrics to prioritize, de-risk, and continuously improve team throughput and platform efficiency.
• Help build a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and continuous improvement.

What you’ll bring

• 6+ years of experience building distributed systems, APIs, or backend platforms in cloud-native environments.
• Strong proficiency in at least one backend language (e.g., Python, Go, C#, or Java) and experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CDK, etc.).
• Familiarity with production-grade AI systems: LLM orchestration, vector databases, embedding models, or safety layers.
• Solid understanding of performance optimization, structured logging, and cost governance in AI or platform contexts.
• Comfort designing systems from scratch as well as iterating on legacy code and architecture.
• Bias for action, ownership mindset, and a collaborative approach to solving ambiguous problems.
• Bonus: contributions to open-source projects in the AI space.

Join Our Team

We’re a publicly traded (NASDAQ: DKNG) technology company headquartered in Boston. As a regulated gaming company, you may be required to obtain a gaming license issued by the appropriate state agency as a condition of employment. Don’t worry, we’ll guide you through the process if this is relevant to your role.

The US base salary range for this full-time position is 160,700.00 USD - 200,900.00 USD, plus bonus, equity, and benefits as applicable. Our ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The compensation information displayed on each job posting reflects the range for new hire pay rates for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific pay range and how that was determined during the hiring process. It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.