Staff Software Engineer

Fanatics Collectibles•New York, NY

19d•$152,000 - $190,000•Remote

About The Position

Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform. We ignite the passions of global sports fans and maximize the presence and reach for our hundreds of sports partners globally by offering products and services across Fanatics Commerce, Fanatics Collectibles, and Fanatics Betting & Gaming, allowing sports fans to Buy, Collect, and Bet. Through the Fanatics platform, sports fans can buy licensed fan gear, jerseys, lifestyle and streetwear products, headwear, and hardgoods; collect physical and digital trading cards, sports memorabilia, and other digital assets; and bet as the company builds its Sportsbook and iGaming platform. Fanatics has an established database of over 100 million global sports fans; a global partner network with approximately 900 sports properties, including major national and international professional sports leagues, players associations, teams, colleges, college conferences and retail partners, 2,500 athletes and celebrities, and 200 exclusive athletes; and over 2,000 retail locations, including its Lids retail stores. Our more than 22,000 employees are committed to relentlessly enhancing the fan experience and delighting sports fans globally. We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer who thrives at the intersection of architecture, strategy, and execution. In this role, you’ll help define and evolve the technical direction of the platforms that power our collectibles ecosystem. You’ll lead architectural discovery, guide system design across teams, and ensure we’re building scalable, resilient systems aligned with long-term business goals. The role is eligible for a remote hire in the US. While you will remain capable of contributing code when needed, your primary focus will be on driving technical vision, enabling teams, and shaping the future of our event-driven architecture.

Requirements

8+ years of experience building and evolving production-grade, distributed systems.
Deep expertise in designing event-driven and message-oriented architectures at scale.
Strong proficiency with Elixir and the Phoenix framework (LiveView experience is a plus), with the ability to guide others even when not directly coding day-to-day.
Proven experience leading architectural decisions across multiple teams or domains.
Strong understanding of system design trade-offs, data consistency models, and service decomposition.
Experience with AWS and cloud-native architectures (e.g., Lambda, S3, RDS, ECS/EKS) and modern CI/CD pipelines.
Ability to operate at both strategic and tactical levels—connecting long-term vision with practical implementation.
Excellent communication skills, with the ability to influence technical direction and align stakeholders.
Experience driving initiatives with minimal direction and high ownership.
Interest in leveraging AI-assisted development tools to accelerate discovery and improve engineering effectiveness.

Nice To Haves

Experience with RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes (EKS).
Familiarity with infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation).
Experience shaping or evolving microservices architectures at scale.
Familiarity with GitHub Actions or similar CI/CD tooling.
Background in performance optimization for real-time or event-driven systems.
Interest in sports, collectibles, or fan engagement platforms.

Responsibilities

Lead architectural design and technical discovery for complex, distributed systems across our platform.
Define and evolve system boundaries, service interactions, and data flow within our event-driven ecosystem.
Guide the design of scalable, fault-tolerant systems leveraging asynchronous communication patterns (e.g., RabbitMQ, Kafka, SNS/SQS).
Partner closely with product, engineering leadership, and cross-functional teams to translate business needs into long-term technical strategy.
Provide technical leadership across multiple teams, ensuring consistency in patterns, practices, and system design.
Drive key technical initiatives, including system modernization, performance optimization, and reliability improvements.
Contribute hands-on when appropriate—especially in prototyping, critical path development, or de-risking complex solutions.
Mentor and coach engineers, elevating technical thinking through design reviews, architecture discussions, and knowledge sharing.
Establish and promote best practices in system design, observability, and operational excellence.
Help guide incident response and postmortems, focusing on systemic improvements and resilience.