Senior Staff Engineer, Distributed Systems - Fanatics Markets

Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform and is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to enhance their event-driven architecture. This role involves tackling complex distributed systems challenges, mentoring engineers, and contributing to architectural integrity while ensuring reliability and performance at peak trading volumes.

Responsibilities:

• Own the design and implementation of critical components within our event-driven platform, with a focus on reliability, scalability, and low-latency performance at peak trading volume
• Partner with senior and principal engineers to drive complex, multi-team technical initiatives from design through production — maintaining architectural integrity throughout
• Be the go-to technical resource within your domain: the engineer others turn to when they hit a hard wall on distributed systems, async messaging, or platform reliability
• Mentor and actively develop senior engineers on your teams, elevating their technical thinking on Kafka, JVM performance, and distributed systems design
• Contribute to the engineering org's standards — authoring technical RFCs, design reviews, and coding patterns that other teams adopt and build on
• Participate in production triage and post-incident reviews, identifying root causes in distributed systems and driving durable fixes that prevent recurrence
• Proactively identify and address technical debt and architectural risk within your domain before it becomes a systemic problem
• Contribute to Fanatics Markets' external technical presence through engineering blog posts, conference talks, or open source — representing the quality of what we're building

Requirements:

• 10+ years building highly scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems in production environments
• Strong hands-on expertise with Kotlin, Java, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes, AWS, and Postgres
• Deep experience with event-driven architecture and async messaging patterns — you've designed and debugged consumer groups, partition strategies, and exactly-once delivery under real constraints
• Proven ability to lead complex technical initiatives across multiple teams, influencing design decisions without direct authority
• Strong communication skills — you can explain a nuanced distributed systems trade-off to an engineer or a product leader with equal clarity
• Solid production instincts — you've been on-call, stabilized systems under pressure, and led post-mortems that actually changed things
• 5+ years building systems at the intersection of high throughput, low latency, and cost efficiency
• Experience in a startup or high-growth environment where ownership is broad and priorities shift fast
• Exposure to prediction markets, real-time trading systems, or financial infrastructure