Senior Staff Engineer, Distributed Systems - Fanatics Markets
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 Staff Engineer to be a cornerstone of the technical foundation powering our event-driven architecture: someone who goes deep on the hardest distributed systems problems, sets the engineering standard within their domain, and raises the technical ceiling of every team they work with. This is a high-impact, high-ownership IC role. You'll work closely with our most senior engineers and architects to solve the problems that sit at the intersection of sub-millisecond latency, high-volume Kafka/Redis pipelines, and a platform where real money is on the line. You won't just execute — you'll shape how we build.
Requirements
- 10+ years building highly scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems in production environments
- Strong hands-on expertise with Kotlin, Java, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes, AWS, and Postgres
- Deep experience with event-driven architecture and async messaging patterns — you've designed and debugged consumer groups, partition strategies, and exactly-once delivery under real constraints
- Proven ability to lead complex technical initiatives across multiple teams, influencing design decisions without direct authority
- Strong communication skills — you can explain a nuanced distributed systems trade-off to an engineer or a product leader with equal clarity
- Solid production instincts — you've been on-call, stabilized systems under pressure, and led post-mortems that actually changed things
Nice To Haves
- 5+ years building systems at the intersection of high throughput, low latency, and cost efficiency
- Experience in a startup or high-growth environment where ownership is broad and priorities shift fast
- Exposure to prediction markets, real-time trading systems, or financial infrastructure
Responsibilities
- Own the design and implementation of critical components within our event-driven platform, with a focus on reliability, scalability, and low-latency performance at peak trading volume.
- Partner with senior and principal engineers to drive complex, multi-team technical initiatives from design through production — maintaining architectural integrity throughout.
- Be the go-to technical resource within your domain: the engineer others turn to when they hit a hard wall on distributed systems, async messaging, or platform reliability.
- Mentor and actively develop senior engineers on your teams, elevating their technical thinking on Kafka, JVM performance, and distributed systems design.
- Contribute to the engineering org's standards — authoring technical RFCs, design reviews, and coding patterns that other teams adopt and build on.
- Participate in production triage and post-incident reviews, identifying root causes in distributed systems and driving durable fixes that prevent recurrence.
- Proactively identify and address technical debt and architectural risk within your domain before it becomes a systemic problem.
- Contribute to Fanatics Markets' external technical presence through engineering blog posts, conference talks, or open source — representing the quality of what we're building.
Benefits
- Ranges will change based on country and state of residence, which are reflected in Geographical Zones defined by Fanatics Betting and Gaming. The range incorporates all of our Geographical Compensation Zones and is subject to change as the Zone associated with the actual offer is confirmed. In addition to the base and bonus, full-time employment, and more. For information about our benefits, please visit https://benefitsatfanatics.com/
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
Number of Employees
5,001-10,000 employees
