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Salary: USD 121,000 - 200,000 / annual
Fanatics is a global digital sports platform serving over 100 million sports fans worldwide. The company operates across three main pillars: Fanatics Commerce (licensed fan gear, jerseys, apparel), Fanatics Collectibles (physical and digital trading cards, memorabilia), and Fanatics Betting & Gaming (sportsbook and iGaming platform). With 22,000+ employees, 900+ sports properties as partners, and 2,000+ retail locations including Lids stores, Fanatics is a major player in the sports fan engagement ecosystem.
As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Fanatics Core team, you will design, develop, test, and maintain highly scalable, distributed systems that power the Fanatics App—a unified platform integrating free-to-play games, live events, ecommerce, and new product experiences. Fanatics Core provides the shared foundations (identity, payments, loyalty, wallet, data, platform) that enable sports betting, ecommerce, collectibles, and other business units to deliver exceptional fan experiences. Every transaction, reward, and checkout on Fanatics depends on systems you build.
Key responsibilities include developing and deploying high-quality production software; building features and tools for your team; participating in on-call rotations to troubleshoot issues; contributing to code reviews and design discussions; mentoring junior engineers and interns; improving testability and operational excellence; and collaborating with product and internal stakeholders on technology decisions. You will help define engineering principles, guidelines, and best practices, remain current on industry trends, and be open to occasional travel to Fanatics offices and conferences.
This role emphasizes a team-first mentality, strong communication across technical and non-technical audiences, and thriving in a high-growth environment where priorities evolve rapidly.
**Requirements:**
- 5+ years of experience building highly scalable, performant, and evolvable backend distributed systems
- Proficiency in Spring with Kotlin and/or Java (strongly preferred)
- Demonstrated ability to drive best practices in backend development and mentor others in effective coding and architectural strategies (clean code, hexagonal/layered architectures, domain-driven design, design patterns)
- Knowledge of observability practices including logging, monitoring, and tracing in distributed systems
- Expertise in Agile software delivery with a track record of modeling and driving process improvements across teams
- Ability to collaborate cross-functionally across diverse teams in large enterprise environments
- Excellent communication skills to convey complex technical concepts to engineers, executives, and non-technical stakeholders
- Team-first mentality with willingness to do what it takes to get the job done
- Ability to thrive in high-growth environments where priorities evolve regularly and decisions are made quickly
**Preferred Qualifications:**
- Strong experience in sports industry, gaming, and content delivery
- Highly effective with Kotlin, Java, and/or Go
- Expertise in messaging technologies such as Kafka or Amazon SQS with solid understanding of event-driven architectures
- Comfortable working with Cloud Native and Infrastructure as Code (Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform)
- Ability to work in diverse codebases (legacy and greenfield) in different languages and environments
