Staff Software Engineer (Remote)

Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform, and they are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to define and evolve the technical direction of their collectibles ecosystem. The role involves leading architectural design, guiding system interactions, and ensuring scalable systems that align with long-term business goals.

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