Staff Engineer - Backend/Java
About The Position
Fanatics is building a global digital sports platform across commerce, collectibles, and betting and gaming. Fanatics Core provides shared foundations—including identity, payments, loyalty, wallet, data, and platform capabilities—that support sports betting, ecommerce, collectibles, and other experiences. The Backend Staff Engineer is a recognized technical leader who works strategically and hands-on to lead ambitious projects and establish technical standards. The role leads complex backend features and systems from architecture through production, balances near-term business needs with long-term technical quality, and helps shape team and organizational direction. The engineer partners across product, design, and engineering to deliver scalable experiences for the Fanatics App and other businesses, while mentoring engineers and promoting a culture of excellence and innovation.
Requirements
- At least 7 years of experience building highly scalable, performant, and evolvable backend distributed systems.
- Demonstrated ability to drive backend development best practices and mentor others in coding and architectural strategies, including clean code, hexagonal or layered architectures, and domain-driven design.
- Knowledge of observability practices, including logging, monitoring, and tracing in distributed systems.
- Expertise in Agile software delivery and a track record of modeling and driving process improvements across teams.
- Ability to collaborate cross-functionally across diverse teams in large enterprise environments and drive alignment and shared success.
- Excellent communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical concepts to engineers, executives, and non-technical stakeholders.
- Team-first mentality and willingness to do what it takes to get the job done while striving for improvement.
- Ability to thrive in a high-growth environment with evolving priorities and quick decision-making.
Nice To Haves
- Proficiency in Spring with Kotlin and/or Java.
- Strong experience in the sports industry, gaming, and content delivery.
- High proficiency with Kotlin, Java, and/or Go.
- Expertise in messaging technologies such as Kafka or Amazon SQS and a solid understanding of event-driven architectures.
- Comfort working with cloud-native technologies and infrastructure as code, such as Kubernetes, Helm, and Terraform.
- Ability to work across legacy and greenfield codebases, languages, and environments.
Responsibilities
- Drive the development, testing, documentation, and deployment of high-quality, scalable software into production.
- Develop a comprehensive understanding of the industry, product, and roadmap to shape team strategy and influence organizational direction.
- Lead end-to-end technical execution of complex features and systems, from ideation and architecture through deployment and refinement.
- Define and enforce engineering principles, guidelines, and best practices.
- Partner with product, design, and other stakeholders to make technical decisions aligned with business goals and long-term scalability.
- Lead incident resolution as part of the on-call rotation, ensuring timely diagnosis and remediation of critical software issues.
- Identify and remove roadblocks, collaborating across teams as needed to maintain momentum on complex projects.
- Conduct and elevate code reviews to improve code quality and share expertise.
- Guide team planning and design discussions, introducing approaches that address technical challenges and optimize design patterns.
- Improve software quality, testability, operational metrics, and team documentation.
- Mentor and coach engineers at all levels, fostering continuous learning and professional growth.
- Be open to occasional travel to Fanatics offices and other locations for conferences, events, meetings, and team-building activities.
Benefits
- The posting references base and bonus compensation for full-time employment and directs applicants to Fanatics' benefits website for benefit information; specific benefits are not listed.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
