Staff Engineer - Backend Kotlin

Fanatics is a leading company in the sports betting and gaming industry, and they are seeking a Staff Engineer for their Client Services team. This role involves leading the technical development of major product features, ensuring high-quality software delivery, and mentoring engineers across multiple teams while driving engineering excellence.

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)