Staff Software Engineer, Growth

PlayOn Sports powers over 250,000 live high school sports events a year across NFHS Network, GoFan, and MaxPreps. The Growth team’s mission is to make it effortless for high school sports fans to find, subscribe to, and stay subscribed to PlayOn’s products.

As a Staff Engineer on the Growth team, you’ll be the technical anchor of a cross-functional pod alongside PM and Design — setting technical direction for our subscription growth surface, shaping how we run experiments at scale, and multiplying the effectiveness of the engineers around you.

We’re looking for someone who has seen consumer subscription growth done well at scale and is ready to own it here. You operate beyond the ticket queue: you spot the problems worth solving before they’re assigned, you influence how the whole pod works, and you raise the floor of what “done well” means for growth engineering at PlayOn.

The outcomes you'll deliver

• Ship a steady cadence of subscription growth experiments across web, mobile, and CTV with measurable impact on conversion, retention, or ARPU.
• Measurably reduce the pod’s experiment cycle time within six months by improving the tooling, process, or infrastructure that slows shipping.
• Establish the Growth team’s standard for experiment hygiene — feature flags, end-to-end validated instrumentation, Core Web Vitals preserved — so the whole pod ships at that bar.
• Define the technical roadmap for the Growth surface: the architecture decisions and platform investments that determine how fast the pod can move over the next 12–18 months.

In this role, you can expect to

• Serve as the technical lead of the cross-functional product trio, owning technical strategy and driving feasibility assessments alongside PM and Design.

• Set the architectural direction for how PlayOn runs subscription growth experiments across NFHS Network, GoFan, and MaxPreps.

• Design, implement, and measure rapid experiments, iterating based on data to optimize conversion, retention, and engagement.

• Build internal tooling and experiment scaffolding that compounds the pod’s velocity over time.

• Leverage AI coding tools and agent-assisted workflows to accelerate experiment delivery and raise the quality bar for the pod.

• Identify and drive resolution of cross-team technical dependencies when growth work requires coordination beyond the pod.

• Mentor engineers on the pod through code and design reviews that move knowledge, not just catch bugs.

To thrive in this role, you have

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including time at staff level or equivalent, with deep focus on consumer subscription growth.

• A track record of technical leadership beyond the team — you’ve shaped how engineering organizations approach growth, experimentation, or subscription infrastructure.

• Direct connection to revenue impact — you’ve moved conversion, ARPU, retention, or LTV at scale and can speak in detail about what worked and what didn’t.

• Full-stack engineering ability across TypeScript/JavaScript with a frontend framework (Vue.js, React, or similar) and Node.js, with comfort in Ruby on Rails for our subscription stack.

• Hands-on experience with the systems that power subscription growth: Stripe or equivalent; Segment, Amplitude, or similar; LaunchDarkly, Statsig, or equivalent.

• Architectural judgment — you’ve made platform-level decisions about experimentation infrastructure or subscription surfaces and lived with the consequences long enough to learn from them.

• Data literacy — you can write SQL, use product analytics tools, and evaluate whether an experiment result is trustworthy.

• Actively uses AI tools (Copilot, Claude, Cursor, or similar) to move faster and produce higher-quality work — and shares what works with the engineers around you.

• Bonus: you’ve built internal growth tooling that accelerated experiment velocity at an org level, you have native mobile or CTV experience (Roku, Fire TV), or you’ve worked in sports media or OTT streaming.

How You Play

Ownership over Participation — You’re accountable for the technical direction and outcomes of the Growth surface, not just your own tickets. You identify the problems worth solving before they’re assigned.

Team over Stars — Your impact is measured by what the whole pod ships. You define what great looks like and make it easier for everyone around you to work at that level.

Growth over Comfort — You make Type II decisions quickly, kill work that isn’t moving metrics, and treat a disproved hypothesis as a win.

Fairness over Popularity — You choose the right architecture and tooling for the platform, not the fashionable one, and hold the line on experiment hygiene even when cutting corners is faster.