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Salary: USD 144,000 - 235,000 / annual
Fanatics is a global digital sports platform serving over 100 million sports fans through commerce, collectibles, and betting/gaming. You will join Fanatics Core, the backend infrastructure team powering identity, payments, loyalty, wallet, data, and platform capabilities across all business lines.
As a Staff Engineer, you are a recognized technical leader operating both strategically and hands-on. You will lead ambitious backend projects, set technical standards for the team, and balance immediate business needs with long-term architectural excellence. Your role spans the full technical lifecycle: from ideation and architecture through deployment and refinement of complex distributed systems.
Key responsibilities include:
- Drive development, testing, documentation, and deployment of high-quality, scalable backend software
- Lead end-to-end technical execution of complex features and systems
- Define and enforce engineering principles, guidelines, and best practices across the team
- Partner with product, design, and stakeholders on high-impact technical decisions aligned with business goals and scalability
- Lead incident resolution as part of on-call rotation
- Proactively identify and remove technical roadblocks; facilitate cross-team collaboration on complex projects
- Elevate code reviews and share expertise to enhance code quality
- Steer team planning and design discussions, introducing innovative approaches to technical challenges
- Champion improvements to software quality, testability, operational metrics, and documentation
- Mentor and coach engineers at all levels, fostering continuous learning and professional growth
- Occasional travel to Fanatics offices for conferences, events, and team-building
You will own the backend infrastructure powering the Fanatics App—a unified platform integrating free-to-play games, live events, ecommerce, and new product experiences. Every transaction, reward, and checkout flows through systems you help architect and maintain.
**Requirements:**
- 7+ 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 track record of modeling and driving process improvements across teams
- Ability to collaborate cross-functionally across diverse teams in large enterprise environments, driving alignment and shared success
- Excellent communication skills; capable of conveying complex technical concepts clearly to engineers, executives, and non-technical stakeholders
- Team-first mentality with willingness to do what it takes to get the job done
- Thrives 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—both legacy and greenfield, in different languages and environments
