Staff Engineer, Payments - Core

Fanatics Inc.•New York, NY

2d•$190,000 - $237,500

About The Position

Fanatics Betting & Gaming is the online and retail sports betting subsidiary of Fanatics Holdings, Inc. The Staff Engineer on the Payments team is the technical owner of systems that move money into, out of, and across Fanatics, including deposits, withdrawals, and payments at checkout. The platform currently serves Sportsbook and Casino and is being extended to other Fanatics businesses, including enabling customers’ shared balances to appear as a payment option alongside cards and bank transfers. The role shapes how Fanatics connects to processors, acquirers, and banking partners to improve approval rates, lower transaction costs, and reduce unnecessary movement of funds. It combines deep backend expertise with architectural leadership: setting technical direction for payments across several teams and partnering with Fraud, Responsible Gaming, Finance, Legal, and Compliance to build reliable, cost-effective payment flows that comply with state regulations and card scheme rules.

Requirements

At least 8 years of professional software engineering experience, with deep expertise in Java and Spring Boot.
Experience building and operating production payment systems, such as deposit and withdrawal flows, payment gateway or processor integrations, card payments, or ACH.
Strong understanding of idempotency, reconciliation, and failure handling in systems that depend on third-party providers.
Experience designing secure, high-scale, low-latency distributed systems.
Experience with event-driven architectures and message streaming platforms such as Kafka.
Working knowledge of security and compliance requirements for handling payment data, including PCI DSS.
Demonstrated success setting technical direction and driving alignment across multiple teams.
Ability to explain complex technical tradeoffs clearly to engineering, product, finance, and leadership audiences.
Comfort working in a fast-paced, regulated environment with changing priorities.

Nice To Haves

Experience in online gaming, sports betting, fintech, or banking.
Knowledge of card networks, acquirers, and issuers, including interchange, transaction classification, and chargeback processes.
Experience with payment orchestration, smart routing, or building a payments platform that serves several business units.
Experience integrating with banking partners or building account funding and money movement products.
Experience with financial reconciliation and settlement reporting.
Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and observability tooling such as Datadog, Grafana, or CloudWatch.
Interest in developer experience, clean API design, and systems that remain maintainable as more teams depend on them.

Responsibilities

Own the architecture of the payments platform, including provider integrations, deposit and withdrawal flows, and services used by other Fanatics businesses to take payments.
Design and build distributed services in Java and Spring Boot for high transaction volumes with strict correctness, security, and uptime requirements.
Build payment orchestration and routing across processors, acquirers, and payment methods, selecting routes based on approval rate, cost, and provider health, with failover when providers degrade.
Design for failures in third-party integrations, including timeouts, retries, idempotency, duplicate callbacks, partial failures, and reconciliation against provider and bank settlement files.
Lead onboarding of providers and banking partners, including evaluating options and defining integration, testing, and rollout approaches.
Build regulatory and card scheme requirements into payment flows, including per-jurisdiction rules and transaction classification, in partnership with Legal, Compliance, and Finance.
Work with Fraud and Risk to incorporate risk signals into payment flows and handle chargebacks and disputes, including attribution when funds are used across businesses.
Reduce payment costs through routing, provider terms, and design choices that avoid unnecessary movement of money.
Set standards for security, data handling, and limiting PCI scope across payment services.
Lead architectural reviews, design sessions, and incident postmortems, and mentor engineers across the team.
Partner with product, frontend, and mobile teams to ensure payment experiences are consistent and clear for customers.
Be open to occasional travel to Fanatics offices or industry events for planning, collaboration, and team development.