Fanatics is a leading company in the sports betting and gaming industry, and they are seeking a Staff Engineer for their Client Services team. The role involves leading technical development, mentoring engineers, and ensuring high-quality software delivery to enhance the customer experience.
Responsibilities:
- Lead the planning, design, and technical development of major product features, from inception through deployment, ensuring alignment with overall platform strategy
- Own and drive technical excellence, including defining and scaling best practices in code quality, system design, and testing across the Client Services domain and peer teams
- Conduct exceptionally thorough and constructive technical design and code reviews to maintain the highest bar for quality, reliability, and security
- Mentor and empower engineers across multiple teams, fostering a culture of technical ownership, innovation, and continuous improvement
- Help your team define and adhere to the principles, guidelines, and best practices of our engineering strategy and actively drive adoption across related client teams
- Lead end-to-end delivery of multi-team projects, coordinating across engineering, product, and design. Effectively represent the team's plans, updates, and technical decisions in cross-functional planning and review forums
- Define and lead the testing strategy for complex client-side features and systems, promoting a culture of quality and ensuring systems are testable by design
- Guide teams in operational best practices, actively raising the bar for observability, reliability, and system resilience. Design, stress-test, and refine systems for maintainability
- Improve the team's processes and response rhythms for handling high-pressure situations, scope changes, or production incidents, fostering an environment of composure and continuous learning
- Develop, test, document, and deploy high quality software into production
- Develop a fundamental understanding of our industry, product, feature set and roadmap
- Work closely with our product team, design, and other internal stakeholders to make technology decisions that grow and improve our products
- Participate in an on-call rotation to address urgent issues outside business hours and contribute to app enhancements and operational efficiency (OE) by troubleshooting and resolving application-related problems
- Escalate when tasks or projects hit roadblocks
- Be open to occasional travel to Fanatics offices and other locations for conferences, events, meetings, and team-building activities
Requirements:
- 7+ years of experience designing and building highly scalable backend services
- Expertise with Kotlin as the primary development language, OR deep knowledge of Java with a strong willingness to transition to and develop primarily in Kotlin
- Proven experience with modern backend frameworks such as Spring Boot or similar
- Experience with Coroutines and Dependency Injection
- Team-first mentality, with a willingness to do what it takes to get the job done and a desire to strive for better
- Able to effectively communicate complex technical subjects to a variety of audiences (engineers, technical leaders, marketing and operations teams, non-technical functional leaders)
- Familiar with Agile software product delivery and SCRUM methodology
- Thrives in a high-growth environment where priorities evolve regularly and decisions are made quickly
- Able to effectively work cross-functionally within an enterprise environment
- A Bachelor's degree, or professional certification, or a combination of education and experience
- Experience designing and building backend services using Spring Boot or similar Java frameworks
- Experience working in large-scale distributed systems and event-driven architectures
- Exposure to cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS, GCP), CI/CD pipelines, and observability tools
- Familiarity with functional programming paradigms and actor-based concurrency frameworks like Apache Pekko (or Akka)