Senior Principal Engineer - Fanatics Markets

Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform and is seeking a Senior Principal Software Engineer to lead the technical direction for their event-driven architecture. This role involves setting long-term strategies, mentoring engineers, and making critical architectural decisions to enhance the platform's scalability and integrity.

Responsibilities:

• Set the long-term architecture strategy for our event-driven platform — getting ahead of complexity rather than reacting to it, and eliminating risks before they become production problems
• Drive strategically critical initiatives across multiple teams, establishing the patterns and trade-off frameworks that become the gold standard across the engineering org
• Serve as the ultimate escalation point for the hardest distributed systems problems — the person teams call when they've hit a wall that no one else can break through
• Mentor and elevate senior engineers, removing bottlenecks and raising the technical ceiling of everyone around you. The measure of success at this level is what the org can build because of you
• Own the high-stakes trade-offs between immediate delivery and long-term architectural integrity, advising product and business leaders with clear, confident technical narratives
• Define and enforce the "Fanatics Standard" for how we build, operate, and scale — from coding patterns and observability practices to incident response and platform resilience
• Proactively audit and simplify the codebase, resolving architectural deficiencies and technical debt before they compound into systemic risk
• Represent Fanatics Markets externally through conference talks, technical writing, and open source contributions — bringing the outside world in and taking what we're building out to the broader engineering community

Requirements:

• 15+ years building highly scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems
• Deep hands-on expertise with Kotlin, Java, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes, AWS, and Postgres
• A track record of defining architecture standards adopted across engineering orgs — not just teams
• The ability to break down complex, ambiguous system problems into actionable strategies for multiple teams simultaneously
• Proven experience translating deep technical complexity into clear narratives for engineers, product leaders, and non-technical executives alike
• Strong instincts for production triage — you've been the person who stabilizes a distributed system under fire
• A history of elevating the engineers around you, not just delivering individually
• 7+ years designing platforms at the intersection of high throughput, low latency, and cost efficiency
• Experience in a startup or high-growth environment where priorities move fast and ownership is broad
• Exposure to prediction markets, real-time trading systems, or financial infrastructure