Senior Principal Engineer - Fanatics Markets

Fanatics Betting & Gaming•New York, NY

1d•Remote

About The Position

Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform. We ignite the passions of global sports fans and maximize the presence and reach for our hundreds of sports partners globally by offering products and services across Fanatics Commerce, Fanatics Collectibles, and Fanatics Betting & Gaming, allowing sports fans to Buy, Collect, and Bet. Through the Fanatics platform, sports fans can buy licensed fan gear, jerseys, lifestyle and streetwear products, headwear, and hardgoods; collect physical and digital trading cards, sports memorabilia, and other digital assets; and bet as the company builds its Sportsbook and iGaming platform. Fanatics has an established database of over 100 million global sports fans; a global partner network with approximately 900 sports properties, including major national and international professional sports leagues, players associations, teams, colleges, college conferences and retail partners, 2,500 athletes and celebrities, and 200 exclusive athletes; and over 2,000 retail locations, including its Lids retail stores. Our more than 22,000 employees are committed to relentlessly enhancing the fan experience and delighting sports fans globally. About the Team Fanatics Markets is the real-money prediction and trading app where you can invest in moments you care about. Built on a secure platform, we let users predict real-world outcomes and trade on events they actually follow - from sports and entertainment to political elections and beyond. Our mission is to redefine how fans engage with the moments and markets that matter most. We're looking for the right people to help us build the future of prediction markets. Role Overview We're looking for a Senior Principal Software Engineer to serve as the technical North Star for our event-driven architecture: the person who sets the standard, makes the hard calls, and shapes how we scale for the next several years. This isn't a heads-down IC role. It's a seat at the table for every major technical decision we make — from how we handle sub-millisecond latency on Kafka/Redis at peak trading volume, to how the entire engineering org thinks about async messaging and distributed systems design.

Requirements

15+ years building highly scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems
Deep hands-on expertise with Kotlin, Java, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes, AWS, and Postgres
A track record of defining architecture standards adopted across engineering orgs — not just teams
The ability to break down complex, ambiguous system problems into actionable strategies for multiple teams simultaneously
Proven experience translating deep technical complexity into clear narratives for engineers, product leaders, and non-technical executives alike
Strong instincts for production triage — you've been the person who stabilizes a distributed system under fire
A history of elevating the engineers around you, not just delivering individually

Nice To Haves

7+ years designing platforms at the intersection of high throughput, low latency, and cost efficiency
Experience in a startup or high-growth environment where priorities move fast and ownership is broad
Exposure to prediction markets, real-time trading systems, or financial infrastructure

Responsibilities

Set the long-term architecture strategy for our event-driven platform — getting ahead of complexity rather than reacting to it, and eliminating risks before they become production problems.
Drive strategically critical initiatives across multiple teams, establishing the patterns and trade-off frameworks that become the gold standard across the engineering org.
Serve as the ultimate escalation point for the hardest distributed systems problems — the person teams call when they've hit a wall that no one else can break through.
Mentor and elevate senior engineers, removing bottlenecks and raising the technical ceiling of everyone around you. The measure of success at this level is what the org can build because of you.
Own the high-stakes trade-offs between immediate delivery and long-term architectural integrity, advising product and business leaders with clear, confident technical narratives.
Define and enforce the "Fanatics Standard" for how we build, operate, and scale — from coding patterns and observability practices to incident response and platform resilience.
Proactively audit and simplify the codebase, resolving architectural deficiencies and technical debt before they compound into systemic risk.
Represent Fanatics Markets externally through conference talks, technical writing, and open source contributions — bringing the outside world in and taking what we're building out to the broader engineering community.