Staff Backend Engineer - Foundations

Fanatics is a company focused on delivering exceptional customer experiences through innovative technology. As a Backend Engineer, you will design and develop scalable systems for the Fanatics App, collaborating with cross-functional teams to enhance user experience and drive technical excellence.

Responsibilities:

• Drive the development, testing, documentation, and deployment of high-quality, scalable software into production
• Develop a comprehensive understanding of the industry, product, architecture, and roadmap, leveraging this knowledge to shape team strategy and influence the direction of the organization
• Lead the end-to-end technical execution of complex features and systems, from ideation and architecture to deployment and refinement
• Define and enforce engineering principles, guidelines, and best practices
• Partner closely with product, design, and other stakeholders to make high-impact technical decisions that align with both business goals and long-term scalability
• Lead incident resolution as part of the on-call rotation, ensuring swift diagnosis and remediation of critical software issues
• Demonstrate ability to lead or drive triage of difficult reliability issues and produce clear root-cause analysis
• Partner Cross functionally, and across multiple teams to bring complex features and projects from prototype to production
• Contribute to engineering excellence through documentation, tooling improvements, code reviews, and knowledge sharing
• Steer team planning and design discussions, introducing innovative approaches to solve technical challenges and optimize design patterns
• Champion improvements to software quality, testability, operational metrics, and team documentation, setting a higher standard for the organization
• Mentor and coach engineers at all levels, fostering a culture of continuous learning and professional growth across the team
• Be open to occasional travel to Fanatics offices and other locations for conferences, events, meetings, and team-building activities

Requirements:

• 7+ years of experience building highly scalable, performant and evolvable backend distributed systems; proficiency in Spring with Kotlin and/or Java is a plus
• Demonstrated ability to drive best practices in backend development and mentor others in effective coding and architectural strategies, such as clean code, hexagonal/layered architectures, domain driven design and other design and architectural patterns
• Expertise in messaging technologies such as Kafka, Kinesis, Flink or Amazon SQS, with a solid understanding of event-driven architectures
• Knowledge of observability practices, including logging, monitoring, and tracing in distributed systems
• Expertise in Agile software delivery, with a track record of modeling and driving process improvements across teams, and ability to collaborate cross-functionally across diverse teams within large enterprise environments, driving alignment and shared success
• Excellent communication skills, capable of conveying complex technical concepts clearly and effectively to diverse audiences, including engineers, executives, and non-technical stakeholders
• Team-first mentality, with a willingness to do what it takes to get the job done and a desire to strive for better
• Thrives in a high-growth environment where priorities evolve regularly and decisions are made quickly
• Strong Experience building segmentation services, high available - low latency applications
• Highly effective with Kotlin, Java and/or Go
• Comfortable working with Cloud Native and Infrastructure as Code, like Kubernetes, Helm and Terraform
• Ability to work in diverse codebases, both legacy and greenfield, in different languages and environments
• Experience with CRM technologies such as SFMC, Braze, etc