Staff Software Engineer - GameChanger

About GameChanger

We believe in the life-changing impact youth sports have on and off the field because they encourage leadership, teamwork, responsibility, and confidence—important life lessons that have the power to propel our youth toward meaningful futures. We recognize that without coaches, parents, and volunteers, organized youth sports could not exist. By building the first and best place to experience the youth sports moments important to our community, we are helping families elevate the next generation through youth sports.

So if you love sports and their community-building potential, or building cool products is your sport, GameChanger is the team for you. We are a remote-first, dynamic tech company based in New York City, and we are solving some of the biggest challenges in youth sports today.

The Position

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will lead the technical design and delivery of integrations and APIs built and operated as products. You will help turn GameChanger’s capabilities and domain expertise into secure, reliable, scalable, and intuitive experiences that developers and partners can build on with confidence.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will work directly with engineers to design, build, and operate integrations and APIs, making key architectural decisions and establishing practical engineering patterns. You will bring experience building developer-facing products and guide decisions across API contracts, authentication and authorization, versioning, documentation, observability, reliability, support, and developer experience.

Your impact will extend across the teams and services that support these products. You will identify cross-system dependencies and risks, establish reusable patterns, and help engineers build backend and integration expertise. You will partner closely with Engineering, Product, Data, Design, and Business Development to translate developer and partner needs into technical plans, align with GameChanger’s broader architecture, and deliver a cohesive integration experience. This role reports to a Sr Engineering Manager.

What You’ll Do

• Lead the technical design and delivery of integrations and API products, partnering with Engineering and Product leaders to shape their technical roadmaps.
• Work hands-on with engineers to design, build, launch, and operate these products, owning critical implementation work and balancing near-term learning with a durable long-term foundation.
• Establish and apply clear standards and reusable patterns for API contracts, authentication and authorization, versioning, rate limiting, error handling, webhooks, documentation, and developer experience.
• Lead system design for integrations and APIs across GameChanger services and external systems, working with service owners to address dependencies, failure modes, and tradeoffs involving performance, security, reliability, maintainability, cost, and future use cases.
• Work with the team to define and implement reliability, observability, support, incident-response, and service-health practices for integration and API products, including meaningful SLIs, SLOs, and operational metrics.
• Partner with Product and business stakeholders to clarify partner needs, inform product decisions, and prioritize technical investments that create customer and business impact.
• Serve as a technical bridge across the teams responsible for backend services, infrastructure, data, and client applications that contribute to the integration and developer experience.
• Evaluate build, buy, and integration options, clearly communicating tradeoffs and recommendations to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Identify architectural risks within integrations, APIs, and their dependencies, and drive practical improvements to scalability, resilience, security, and ease of evolution.
• Use and improve lightweight practices for design reviews, technical proposals, API lifecycle decisions, and documenting architectural tradeoffs across your projects.
• Mentor engineers, including senior engineers, deepen backend and API expertise across the teams you work with, and raise the technical bar through pairing, design reviews, code reviews, and knowledge sharing.
• Build trusted relationships across Engineering, Product, and business functions; surface areas of disagreement early and drive decisions to clear outcomes.
• Participate in an occasional on-call rotation and model strong ownership of production systems.

Who You Are

• You are a hands-on technical leader who can connect product goals to system architecture, break complex initiatives into deliverable milestones, and work through implementation details.
• You have strong product judgment and understand that successful integrations and API products include contracts, documentation, developer workflows, operations, and support—not only endpoints.
• You are comfortable taking ownership of an ambiguous, high-impact space, clarifying the most important problems, and creating a path forward without detailed direction.
• You decompose complex problems that span teams and services, clarify dependencies and ownership, and help teams deliver toward a shared outcome.
• You reason clearly about tradeoffs and design systems for both immediate needs and plausible future use cases.
• You build trust with technical, product, and business partners and adapt your communication to create clarity and alignment.
• You lead through influence, direct contribution, and follow-through, and you take accountability for outcomes rather than stopping at recommendations.
• You invest in other engineers and create reusable guidance, tools, and practices that improve quality and decision-making across the teams you work with.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software development experience, including hands-on technical leadership on complex, business-critical systems.
• Demonstrated experience building and operating integrations or developer-facing APIs as products.
• Deep knowledge of API design and lifecycle management, including authentication and authorization, versioning, backwards compatibility, rate limiting, documentation, and developer experience.
• Experience designing and evolving distributed, high-scale production systems with strong security, reliability, observability, and performance characteristics.
• Experience leading the technical design and delivery of substantial initiatives that span multiple teams or services, from problem definition through production operation.
• Experience defining production-readiness standards, service health metrics, incident practices, and longer-term reliability investments.
• A track record of aligning technical and non-technical stakeholders, resolving cross-team ambiguity, and connecting technical decisions to customer and business outcomes.
• Experience mentoring engineers, including senior engineers, and improving engineering practices across your team and closely collaborating teams.
• Experience working with third-party developers, strategic partners, API consumers, or platform ecosystems is strongly preferred.
• Experience with TypeScript, Node.js, AWS, Redis, and PostgreSQL is preferred.

Perks & Benefits

• Work remotely throughout the US (excluding AK, DE, HI, IA, LA, MS, MT, OK, and SC) or from our office in Manhattan, NY.
• Unlimited vacation policy.
• Technology stipend: $4,000 every 2 years.
• WFH stipend: $500 annually.
• Monthly physical, mental, wellness & learning stipend through Holisticly.
• Monthly lifestyle stipend through Fringe.
• Full health benefits (medical, dental, vision, prescription, FSA, HRA, HSA, dependent coverage).
• 401(k) retirement savings (Traditional and Roth) with immediate company match.
• Life and disability insurance.
• Company-paid parental leave (up to 20 weeks birthing, up to 12 weeks non-birthing).
• Family building benefits through Progyny.
• DICK'S Sporting Goods teammate discount.