Staff Software Engineer - Streaming Data Platform

Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform, and they are seeking a Staff Software Engineer for their Streaming Data Platform team. In this role, you will design, build, and operate backend services for streaming infrastructure, mentor engineers, and lead technical initiatives.

Responsibilities:

• Design and build backend services that power our streaming data infrastructure, including ingestion, processing, and delivery to downstream systems
• Drive large, multi-milestone projects from idea to production, ensuring they deliver outcomes that matter to the business
• Set technical direction for the team: architecture, code quality, patterns, and tooling
• Partner with leadership on roadmap and planning — you'll have a voice in what we build and why
• Collaborate with platform, data, and product teams to design service boundaries, APIs, and data contracts
• Own the test strategy for complex areas and push the team toward better testing habits and testable designs
• Build observability, reliability, and resilience into our systems and hold the team to that standard
• Coordinate across engineers and teams to deliver cross-cutting initiatives
• Help diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks related to ingestion, throughput, and distributed system behavior
• Mentor engineers on craft, ownership, and collaboration
• Participate in on-call rotations, drive incident resolution, and make sure retros lead to lasting fixes
• Be open to occasional travel to Fanatics offices for meetings, events, or team gatherings

Requirements:

• 7 +years of experience building and operating backend services at scale, with a track record of leading large technical initiatives
• Strong experience with Go
• Hands-on experience with Kafka or comparable streaming platforms. You've built and operated streaming infrastructure in production, including pipeline design, throughput tuning, and operational concerns like monitoring and incident response
• Familiarity with the broader streaming ecosystem — tools like Flink, Spark, or Iceberg, and patterns around partitioning, data skew, and event-driven architectures
• Ability to design whole systems and services with clear boundaries, well-defined APIs, and operational readiness from the start
• Experience driving multi-milestone projects that span teams and require cross-functional coordination
• Track record of influencing technical roadmaps and connecting engineering work to business strategy
• History of mentoring engineers and raising the level of engineering practice around you
• Solid understanding of distributed systems, service-oriented architectures, and system integrations at scale
• Clear communicator who can talk about technical work with both engineers and non-engineers
• Comfortable in a fast-moving environment where priorities shift and decisions happen quickly
• Experience with schema management, data contracts, or data governance patterns is a plus
• Experience building shared libraries, frameworks, or developer-facing tooling for streaming consumers is a plus
• Experience contributing to open-source data infrastructure or streaming projects is a plus
• Familiarity with infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform is a plus