Staff Software Engineer

Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform. They are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to define and evolve the technical direction of their collectibles ecosystem, focusing on architectural design and system scalability.

Responsibilities:

• Lead architectural design and technical discovery for complex, distributed systems across our platform
• Define and evolve system boundaries, service interactions, and data flow within our event-driven ecosystem
• Guide the design of scalable, fault-tolerant systems leveraging asynchronous communication patterns (e.g., RabbitMQ, Kafka, SNS/SQS)
• Partner closely with product, engineering leadership, and cross-functional teams to translate business needs into long-term technical strategy
• Provide technical leadership across multiple teams, ensuring consistency in patterns, practices, and system design
• Drive key technical initiatives, including system modernization, performance optimization, and reliability improvements
• Contribute hands-on when appropriate—especially in prototyping, critical path development, or de-risking complex solutions
• Mentor and coach engineers, elevating technical thinking through design reviews, architecture discussions, and knowledge sharing
• Establish and promote best practices in system design, observability, and operational excellence
• Help guide incident response and postmortems, focusing on systemic improvements and resilience

Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience building and evolving production-grade, distributed systems
• Deep expertise in designing event-driven and message-oriented architectures at scale
• Strong proficiency with Elixir and the Phoenix framework (LiveView experience is a plus), with the ability to guide others even when not directly coding day-to-day
• Proven experience leading architectural decisions across multiple teams or domains
• Strong understanding of system design trade-offs, data consistency models, and service decomposition
• Experience with AWS and cloud-native architectures (e.g., Lambda, S3, RDS, ECS/EKS) and modern CI/CD pipelines
• Ability to operate at both strategic and tactical levels—connecting long-term vision with practical implementation
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to influence technical direction and align stakeholders
• Experience driving initiatives with minimal direction and high ownership
• Interest in leveraging AI-assisted development tools to accelerate discovery and improve engineering effectiveness
• Experience with RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes (EKS)
• Familiarity with infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation)
• Experience shaping or evolving microservices architectures at scale
• Familiarity with GitHub Actions or similar CI/CD tooling
• Background in performance optimization for real-time or event-driven systems
• Interest in sports, collectibles, or fan engagement platforms