Wisely Optimize is a basketball analytics company focused on transforming complex data into actionable insights for coaches and decision-makers. They are seeking a Basketball Data Engineer to lead their data and backend systems, ensuring the efficient flow of data from sources to workflows used in basketball operations.
Responsibilities:
- Design, build, and maintain the pipelines that ingest data from external APIs and move it cleanly through to presentation in Django — transformations, validation, automation, and reporting workflows
- Design, optimize, and maintain our data layer ( AWS + Postgres feeding our Django app) — schema design, query performance, reliability, and scale
- Own pipeline orchestration, observability, and deployment
- Keep data fast, fresh, and dependable through high-usage periods (portal cycle, preseason, conference play)
- Comfortable in an afternoon daily standup rhythm, clear about progress and blockers
- Design and implement near-real-time data updates for game nights — streaming vs. batch tradeoffs, incremental updates, caching, and freshness-vs-cost decisions
- Django backend work beyond data: endpoints, business logic, permissions, admin tooling
- Front-end features and UX improvements within our current stack
- Turning 'coach needs' into clean, simple, dependable workflows end to end
Requirements:
- Proven, elite data and database engineering
- Excellent with relational databases (Postgres), data modeling, pipeline design, and query/performance optimization
- Solid Python and SQL; real experience building and maintaining data pipelines (API → database → app)
- Comfort with AWS and a deployment/monitoring mindset
- High motor + ownership: you communicate clearly, ship consistently, and follow through
- Hunger to grow into a full-stack engineer over time
- You think in terms of data freshness: you can reason about when data needs to be real-time vs. batch, and you've built (or can clearly design) systems that keep fast-moving data current under load
- You have a passion for basketball and want to work in Basketball Operations long-term
- Prefect, Datadog, or comparable orchestration/observability tooling
- Django experience
- B2B SaaS or analytics product experience
- Experience in fast-moving, small-team environments