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