Staff Data Engineer

Fanatics Betting & Gaming • New York, NY

2d • $180,500 - $237,500 • Remote

About The Position

Fanatics Betting and Gaming is seeking a Staff Data Engineer to join its Data Engineering team, which builds and governs the data foundation supporting the business. The role sets technical direction for Python ingestion pipelines, Airflow orchestration, and Snowflake/Databricks, ensuring data moves reliably, securely, and cost-effectively from source to decision-ready output.

This is a senior individual-contributor role with broad scope and influence. The Staff Data Engineer owns the architecture of critical data systems, defines engineering standards, and addresses novel, ambiguous, high-stakes problems. The role is accountable for outcomes and partners across engineering, business, and governance functions to deliver scalable data capabilities.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of professional software or data engineering experience, including significant experience owning production data platforms at scale.
• Track record of designing and delivering large, cross-team data systems from ambiguous requirements through production operation.
• Expert-level Python and SQL, with deep experience in ETL/ELT patterns for complex, high-volume transformations.
• Deep expertise in Airflow or Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow, including DAG design at scale and operational best practices.
• Strong command of pipeline fundamentals, including idempotency, backfills, schema evolution, late-arriving data, data quality frameworks, and failure recovery.
• Hands-on experience with several of Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, dbt, Tableau, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL, and the judgment to select appropriate tools.
• Experience building data security and governance capabilities, including PII masking, RBAC, catalog/lineage, and reusable pipeline frameworks that other engineers can extend.
• Strong testing, CI/CD, and code review practices, with the ability to set those standards for a team.
• Proven ability to mentor engineers, influence without authority, and build alignment across teams.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including design documents, tradeoff analysis, and incident write-ups.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with reverse ETL, real-time or streaming data such as Kafka, and observability tools such as Datadog.
• Experience with FinOps and cost governance on cloud data platforms.
• Background in gaming, betting, e-commerce, or another regulated industry, including audit, compliance, and responsible handling of PII.
• Experience leading platform migrations or major re-architectures.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and design of ingestion pipelines, orchestration frameworks, and data delivery systems, producing design documents for implementation by other engineers.
• Define and evolve team frameworks, conventions, and reference patterns for pipelines, Airflow DAGs, testing, monitoring, and catalog registration.
• Lead diagnosis and systemic resolution of novel data integrity, performance, and reliability issues; convert recurring failures into runbooks, automation, or improved designs.
• Set and track reliability standards, including SLOs, alerting, and on-call health, and reduce operational toil.
• Lead data security and governance strategy, including PII masking, RBAC, data classification, and lineage, in partnership with Security, Legal, and Compliance.
• Design reverse ETL and data delivery integrations, including integrations such as Segment, LaunchDarkly, Kafka, and S3, with clear SLAs, downstream-impact analysis, and failure-handling guarantees.
• Drive platform decisions involving Snowflake, Databricks, and AWS, including cost optimization, capacity planning, and build-versus-buy evaluation.
• Lead specification and design reviews, anticipate downstream impact, race conditions, idempotency gaps, and failure modes, and rigorously review high-risk pull requests.
• Partner with BI, Data Science, Product, and business leadership to turn ambiguous requirements into scalable solutions, prioritize competing demands, and shape the roadmap.
• Mentor engineers at every level, represent the team in cross-functional forums, pay down technical debt, and participate in hiring.

Benefits

• Benefits information is available at https://benefitsatfanatics.com/.
• Base salary and bonus are referenced for full-time employment; specific benefits are not listed in the posting.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed