Staff Data Engineer

Fanatics•New York, NY

About The Position

As a Staff Data Platform Engineer in the Fanatics Ecosystem organization, you will design, build, and own core systems within our streaming data platform. This is a deeply technical, hands-on role where you are expected to be a primary implementer of the platform's most important capabilities while also setting the technical direction for how those systems evolve. You will build and operate core platform services—schema management, aggregation frameworks, event mesh—and define the technical standards and patterns that the team follows. You'll partner with product and engineering teams across the company to translate their needs into platform capabilities, and you'll design and implement the shared libraries, frameworks, and tooling that make it easy for other engineers to produce and consume data streams reliably.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in backend engineering, data engineering, or platform engineering.
Deep expertise with Kafka, including internals, operational tuning, and ecosystem tooling.
Track record designing and operating multi-service distributed systems.
Experience setting technical direction for a team or domain.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, with experience presenting complex technical topics to diverse audiences.
Experience with schema evolution, data contracts, or data governance patterns.

Nice To Haves

Experience building self-service platforms or developer-facing tooling is a plus.
Experience with infrastructure as code tools; Terraform experience is a plus.
Experience developing in Go is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate core platform systems, including schema management, streaming frameworks, and event mesh systems.
Define technical standards and patterns for the Streaming Data Platform team.
Lead cross-team design reviews for systems that interact with or depend on the streaming platform.
Drive platform reliability, performance, and cost strategy across streaming services.
Design and implement shared libraries, frameworks, and tooling for stream consumers.
Partner with product and engineering teams to translate requirements into platform capabilities.
Produce technical proposals and documentation that communicate design, trade-offs, and long-term implications.
Serve as an escalation point for complex streaming issues and high-impact incidents.
Sponsor and grow senior engineers through technical mentorship and challenging assignments.