Staff Backend Engineer

Fanatics Collectibles•Los Angeles, NY

2d•Remote

About The Position

Fanatics Live is building a live-commerce platform for sports fans and collectors, combining content, community, and commerce in interactive digital experiences. The Staff Software Engineer will help shape and build its web and software platforms, addressing challenging technical problems and establishing architecture, engineering practices, and technical direction to support fast, reliable development at scale. This is a highly technical individual-contributor position that combines hands-on engineering with influence across teams. The engineer will partner with Engineering, Product, Design, Data, and other stakeholders to turn product opportunities into scalable, reliable customer experiences. The role includes leading complex initiatives, evolving platform architecture, setting reusable standards, improving operational quality, responding to production issues, and mentoring engineers.

Requirements

At least 8 years of professional software engineering experience, including building and operating production software at scale.
Deep expertise in modern web and software engineering, with significant experience in frontend, backend, API, distributed systems, or full-stack development.
Demonstrated experience architecting and delivering complex systems involving multiple services, components, or engineering teams.
Experience leading significant technical initiatives without formal people-management authority.
Strong understanding of scalable web architectures, APIs, caching, asynchronous processing, cloud infrastructure, performance, and system reliability.
Ability to navigate ambiguous problems, identify important technical challenges, and create a clear path forward.
Strong architectural judgment and ability to balance near-term delivery with long-term technical health.
Experience influencing engineering standards, architecture, or development practices beyond immediate projects.
Strong communication skills and ability to explain complex technical decisions and tradeoffs to varied audiences.
Track record of mentoring engineers and improving the effectiveness of colleagues.

Nice To Haves

Experience building high-scale consumer marketplaces, e-commerce, live streaming, social or community products, payments, auctions, or other real-time digital products.
Experience building software for high-profile live events or rapidly changing traffic patterns.
Experience with real-time communication technologies and event-driven architectures.
Experience optimizing consumer web applications for performance, reliability, and conversion.

Responsibilities

Lead the technical design and delivery of complex, high-impact initiatives across Fanatics Live.
Design and evolve scalable architectures for live commerce, discovery, community interaction, and transactional experiences.
Solve ambiguous engineering problems spanning multiple systems, services, and teams.
Establish technical direction, reusable patterns, and engineering standards to help teams build quickly and reliably.
Partner with Product and Design to translate customer and business opportunities into technical solutions.
Contribute hands-on through architecture, prototyping, implementation, code review, debugging, and solving challenging engineering problems.
Identify and address scalability, reliability, security, performance, and operational risks.
Balance delivery speed, customer experience, technical quality, operational complexity, and long-term platform health.
Improve observability, testing, deployment safety, performance, and resilience across critical Fanatics Live experiences.
Lead technical responses to significant production issues and turn lessons learned into lasting platform improvements.
Mentor engineers and raise technical standards through design reviews, code reviews, and day-to-day technical leadership.
Build alignment across engineering teams and clearly communicate technical decisions to technical and non-technical partners.