Engineering Manager - Sportsbook (Backend)

What are we building?

Hard Rock Digital is a fiercely focused team working to become the best online sportsbook, casino, and social gaming company in the world. We're building a deeply curious team with a passion for learning, operating, and building new products and technologies for millions of consumers. We're customer-obsessed — we care about each customer interaction, experience, behavior, and insight, and strive to ensure we're always acting authentically.

Rooted in the kindred spirits of Hard Rock and the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Hard Rock Digital taps a brand known the world over as the leader in gaming, entertainment, and hospitality. We're taking that foundation of success and bringing it to the digital space - ready to join us?

What's the position?

We are looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead our Sportsbook Experience backend team within the Sportsbook unit at Hard Rock Digital. You will own people leadership, team health, and engineering excellence for the pod that builds and operates the Java/Spring services behind Hard Rock Bet — event and market data, pricing and odds delivery, betslip and bet placement, cash out, and the high-throughput APIs and streaming feeds that power our web, native, and retail clients.

You will partner closely with Product Owners, the Director of Sportsbook, Technical Delivery Leads and other Engineering Managers to deliver high-quality software in alignment with product priorities, while fostering a culture where engineers do their best work. You will also be a key voice in our push to become an AI-first organization: we expect you to champion the use of AI-augmented development, responsible AI practices, and continuous learning so your team and our products benefit from AI-led innovation.

This is an opportunity to have real impact on how we work, how we build, and how we leverage AI—every day.

How we work at HRD

• Product-driven: Product sets the north star; Engineering Managers ensure their teams can execute with clarity and quality. We balance delivery with technical health and support Technical Leads on cross-pod coordination and delivery.

• Clear roles: EMs own people (performance, career growth, hiring), team health, and working with the team on technology decisions. Technical Leads own delivery across pods, project coordination, and vendor/architecture alignment. You will work in lockstep with your TL and Product Owner.

• Collaboration: We work across pods and with Product, Design, QA, and Platform. We value transparency, backlog refinement, and early alignment so we can deliver predictably and improve continuously.

• Excellence and ownership: We hold ourselves to high standards. Compliance, security, and documentation are part of how we design and build—especially in a real-money, in-play sportsbook, where reliability, latency, and regulation matter every day.

AI-first organization

Hard Rock Digital is committed to becoming an AI-first organization. Our AI Center of Excellence (AI CoE) exists to empower AI-led innovation by orchestrating partnerships, democratizing knowledge and tools, and building capabilities that deliver value through safe and responsible use of AI.

What this means for you and your team

• AI-augmented development is essential. We allow and support AI-generated code from approved tools (e.g. Cody, GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude). All such code must be understood, reviewed, and tested before merge—you own what you check in. We have clear AI Code Check-In Best Practices and expect EMs to reinforce them.

• We invest in AI across the stack. Tech is actively deploying AI in requirements gathering and planning, PR/code review (e.g. Derpbot), alert investigation (e.g. Alerti), API and E2E testing acceleration, and exploration of agentic workflows and MCPs. We want leaders who will adopt these tools and advocate for their responsible use.

• We build and govern responsibly. We have an AI Charter, Policy, and governance so we innovate with appropriate guardrails. Your role includes helping your team use AI effectively while adhering to our standards and compliance expectations—especially in a regulated domain like sports betting.

• We learn and share. We have an AI focus group, recommended learning paths, and initiatives that span from code to operations to product. We are looking for an EM who will keep the Sportsbook Experience pod engaged with AI initiatives and who sees AI as a force multiplier for the team and the product.

• We want a leader who is excited to operate in this environment and to help shape how Sportsbook and HRD work in an AI-first way.

• People & team: Run regular 1:1s, stand-ups, and ad-hoc support. Address impediments, clarify priorities, and ensure the team has the resources and context to deliver. Own performance feedback, career development, and workforce planning so the team stays motivated and high-performing.

• Delivery & process: Monitor sprint progress, adjust priorities when needed, and keep work well scoped and estimated. Work with Product to break down requirements into clear features and user stories. Use backlog grooming, sprint planning, and retrospectives to improve predictability and quality.

• Stakeholder alignment: Partner with Product Owners, Technical Leads, other EMs, and leadership to align on objectives, dependencies, and risks. Represent the team in cross-team and Sportsbook-wide discussions.

• Technical partnership (hands-on): Stay close to the code. Review pull requests on merit, contribute to design and architecture for our Java/Spring services, help debug production issues, and prototype where it unblocks the team. Ensure solutions follow our standards and best practices, and support the TL on vendor and technical stakeholder management where it affects your team.

• Platform health & operations: Own the reliability, latency, and correctness of the services your team runs. Support in-play peaks and major sporting events with strong observability, sensible on-call practices, and genuine learning from incidents.

• Hiring & composition: Assess workload and skills, identify hiring needs, and participate in recruiting and hiring. Help shape a team that can meet delivery commitments and grow over time.

• Culture & AI: Foster an inclusive, collaborative environment. Champion our values and our AI-first direction: encourage use of approved AI tools, reinforce "you own what you check in," and keep the team connected to AI initiatives and learning.

Requirements

What are we looking for?

• Leadership experience: Several years in technology with a meaningful portion in leadership or management—driving technical excellence, mentoring engineers, and delivering through others.

• Backend engineering background (essential): You come from backend engineering and have built and run production systems in Java with Spring / Spring Boot. Strong grounding in microservices, REST APIs, event-driven architecture (e.g. Kafka), relational and NoSQL data stores, and operating services on AWS/Kubernetes.

• Hands-on capability: You still read and write code. You can assess a pull request on its merits, reason about a thread dump, a slow query, or a latency spike, and pair with an engineer on a hard problem. This is not a purely process-focused management role.

• Self-motivated and autonomous: You set your own agenda, spot problems before they are escalated to you, and drive them to resolution without being asked. You are comfortable with ambiguity and ownership, and you set the same expectation for your team.

• Sportsbook domain fit: Experience or strong interest in sportsbook, trading, real-time/high-throughput systems, or other low-latency regulated platforms. Comfort with compliance, security, and operational rigour is important.

• AI mindset: Curiosity and openness to AI-augmented development and AI initiatives. You don't need to be an AI expert, but you should be eager to learn, to adopt appro