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Fanatics is a global digital sports platform serving over 100 million sports fans through commerce, collectibles, and betting/gaming. The Core team builds the foundational platform—identity, payments, loyalty, wallet, data, and platform services—that powers all of Fanatics' products.
As Principal Engineer for the Strategic Engineering Group, you will serve as a technical North Star, setting standards and making high-impact architectural decisions. This is not a heads-down individual contributor role; you sit at the table for every major technical decision, from sub-millisecond latency optimization on Kafka/Redis at peak volume to company-wide distributed systems design.
Key responsibilities include:
- Set long-term architecture strategy for the event-driven platform, proactively eliminating technical debt and systemic risks
- Drive strategically critical cross-vertical initiatives and establish patterns that become organizational standards
- Serve as escalation point for complex distributed systems problems, providing technical guidance to unblock teams
- Mentor and elevate senior engineers and technical leaders, raising the technical ceiling across the organization
- Partner with product and business leaders to define technical strategy and build consensus on high-impact work
- Champion organizational excellence in testing, observability, incident response, and platform resilience
- Represent the organization externally through technical writing, conference talks, and open-source contributions
You will lead engineering initiatives, shape direction across teams, consult on cross-functional changes, and drive proof-of-concepts to challenge the status quo.
Required: 15+ years software engineering experience, including 10+ years at Senior Staff level or above; proven ability to lead multi-team programs over multi-quarter timelines with minimal oversight; track record of identifying business-critical problems and building investment cases; experience setting technical patterns adopted org-wide; mentoring of Staff/Senior Staff engineers; strong incident leadership and systemic hardening focus; excellent communication across engineering and business stakeholders.
Preferred: experience in payments, identity, or loyalty platforms in regulated environments (gaming, fintech); org convergence or large-scale architectural migration; SOX/PCI compliance familiarity.
