Senior Software Engineer Sports AI

By bringing together next-gen technology and the finest live data available Genius Sports is enabling a new era of sports for fans worldwide delivering experiences that are more immersive interactive and personalized than ever before. Learn more at geniussports.com. 

About the Role  

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer on our Sports AI team to help build the next generation of real-time AI systems powering sports analysis and insights. 

These systems transform live sports broadcasts (incorporating signals from video crowd noise audio commentary and text) into a structured understanding of game context and auto-generated insights. The outputs from these systems power a range of products including automated highlight clipping augmented broadcasts semi-automatic play-by-play collection and natural-language insight generation. For example these systems can detect a goal attribute it to the correct player and localize where it occurred on the pitch within seconds by combining crowd noise spikes commentary signals and video cues. 

This role sits at the intersection of streaming and distributed systems AI and product engineering. You’ll build and operate real-time pipelines that process noisy asynchronous inputs under tight latency constraints. These systems combine traditional streaming and data processing techniques with modern multimodal AI models to produce reliable outputs in production. 

You’ll work on challenges like aligning signals across multiple sources handling uncertainty and inconsistency in model outputs and designing systems that degrade gracefully in real-world conditions. We are early in building these capabilities so the role involves working through ambiguity experimenting with different approaches and building new systems from first principles where established patterns don’t yet exist. 

Key Responsibilities 

• Design build and operate real-time streaming systems that convert live sports broadcasts into structured events attributes and insights
• Ingest and synchronize signals from video audio commentary and data feeds under real-world latency and reliability constraints
• Integrate modern AI models into production systems including multi-step pipelines where model outputs are composed validated and refined
• Design and implement evaluation and observability frameworks to measure system quality including offline benchmarks real-time metrics and regression testing
• Develop mechanisms for identifying and handling uncertainty in model outputs such as confidence scoring validation checks and human-in-the-loop workflows where appropriate
• Own systems end-to-end from early prototypes through production making key architectural decisions around scalability reliability and performance
• Collaborate closely with product and data partners to shape prioritize and ship high-impact systems
• Mentor engineers and help establish best practices for building and operating applied AI systems in production 

  
Qualifications   

• 5+ years of experience building production-grade software systems 
• Strong software engineering fundamentals including system design testing observability and performance 
• Experience building streaming data-intensive and/or distributed systems with real-time constraints
• Proven ability to design scalable systems that are robust under real-world conditions including handling partial failures inconsistent data and latency tradeoffs
• Ability to evaluate system quality beyond traditional metrics (e.g. ambiguous or probabilistic outputs)
• Product-minded: able to translate ambiguous problems into practical high-impact solutions
• Strong demonstrated interest in building AI-powered features or systems; keep up with latest generative AI progress and capabilities
• Comfortable working in fast-moving iterative environments with evolving requirements 

  
Preferred Qualifications   

• Hands-on experience integrating LLMs and other ML/AI systems in production workflows via platforms like Vertex AI or AWS Bedrock
• Experience building or maintaining human-in-the-loop workflows
• Familiarity with streaming systems and tooling (e.g. Pulsar Kafka Flink etc.)
• Experience working with audio/video streaming and processing systems including familiarity with media delivery protocols (e.g. HLS DASH RTP) container formats codecs and tooling such as FFmpeg or GStreamer
• Background or strong interest in sports
• Experience with Rust 

The salary for this role is based on an annualized range of $160000 - $230000 USD. This role will also be eligible to take part in Genius Sports Group's benefits plan.

We enjoy an ‘office-first’ culture and maximize opportunities to collaborate connect and learn together. Our hybrid working models differ depending on your role and location. Occasional travel may be required.

As well as a competitive salary and range of benefits we’re committed to supporting employee wellbeing and helping you grow your skills experience and career. Learn more about how rewarding life at Genius can be at Reward | Genius Sports. One team being brave driving change 

We strive to create an inclusive working environment where everyone feels a sense of belonging and the ability to make a difference. Learn more about our values and culture at Culture | Genius Sports.

Let us know when you apply if you need any assistance during the recruiting process due to a disability.

What We Do

Genius Sports is the layer between what happens on the field and how the world engages with it. Our solutions across the global sports ecosystem are underpinned by our next generation big data and artificial intelligence platform GeniusIQ. By ingesting and computing multiple real-time data feeds GeniusIQ powers a wide range of functions and applications across sports performance and officiation fan engagement advertising and sports betting. Founded in 2001 Genius Sports is now one of the world’s largest sports technology companies working with the likes of the NFL NBA EPL FIBA ESPN Sky Sports Flutter DraftKings and 100s more. We're headquartered in New York and London with offices in Los Angeles Medellin Tallinn Sofia Singapore Lausanne Manchester and Melbourne.

Why Work With Us

We are one team being brave driving change. Our company values help create a cohesive culture where we think feel and act like One Genius. We strive to create an environment where everyone feels a sense of belonging and the ability to make a difference driving our vision to be everywhere in sports redefining experiences through technology.

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