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. 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 tool