Senior Software Engineer – Client Service

Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform, and they are seeking a Senior Software Engineer for their Betting & Gaming division. The role involves designing and evolving client-facing service layers that power Sportsbook and Casino experiences, focusing on backend services and APIs to deliver reliable and personalized experiences for sports fans.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the design and development of consumer-facing backend services powering mobile Sportsbook and Casino experiences
• Architect and own backend-for-frontend (BFF) services that aggregate, transform, and optimize data for mobile clients
• Drive API design and service contracts in partnership with mobile engineers and product managers
• Translate complex product requirements into scalable, maintainable technical solutions
• Lead implementation of major backend initiatives from design through production readiness, including testing, observability, and operational planning
• Make and guide architectural decisions around data flow, service boundaries, resiliency, and performance optimization
• Improve system reliability, scalability, and latency for real-time betting and gameplay systems
• Participate in and help evolve the team’s on-call practices; lead root cause analysis and long-term reliability improvements
• Establish and promote best practices for observability, logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting
• Provide technical mentorship to other engineers through code reviews, design reviews, and knowledge sharing
• Contribute to technical roadmaps, quarterly planning, and cross-team architecture discussions
• Continuously deepen understanding of the business domain, including sports event hierarchies, betting workflows, and data quality considerations
• Foster a high-performing, inclusive engineering culture
• Be open to occasional travel to Fanatics offices or industry events for collaboration and team-building

Requirements:

• 7+ years of professional software development experience, primarily focused on backend or service-oriented systems
• Strong programming expertise with significant hands-on experience in Kotlin OR Java
• Proven experience designing, building, and operating scalable backend services and RESTful APIs (ideally using Spring Boot, Spring Web, or similar frameworks)
• Deep understanding of microservices architecture, distributed systems patterns, and API design principles
• Experience leading technical design discussions and making architectural tradeoffs
• Strong experience with databases (SQL and/or NoSQL), data modeling, caching strategies, and performance tuning
• Demonstrated ownership of services from design through long-term production support
• Experience improving system reliability, scalability, and operational maturity in production environments
• Strong familiarity with monitoring, alerting, CI/CD pipelines, and incident response processes
• Ability to drive complex technical initiatives with minimal oversight
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to reason through ambiguous, high-impact challenges
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence cross-functional stakeholders in a remote-first environment
• Experience designing and operating large-scale distributed or event-driven systems
• Strong familiarity with Apache Kafka or similar messaging/streaming platforms
• Experience with Pekko (or Akka), reactive programming models, or asynchronous processing
• Experience building and scaling backend-for-frontend (BFF) architectures for mobile applications
• Experience in building backend services in Kotlin
• Knowledge of cloud platforms such as GCP or AWS and containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Experience optimizing systems for low latency, high throughput, and real-time data delivery
• Background working with data-intensive services, live feeds, or real-time processing pipelines
• Experience mentoring engineers and contributing to technical hiring processes
• Interest in sports, gaming, or highly interactive consumer products