Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform, and they are seeking a Senior Software Engineer for their Distributed Systems team. The role involves designing and building scalable distributed systems that support real-money trading, while collaborating with experienced engineers to influence technical decisions and shape the platform's future.
Responsibilities:
- Design, build, and scale distributed systems using Kotlin, Java, and Spring Boot, architecting for the traffic spikes and concurrency demands of a live real-money trading platform
- Own the development and optimization of high-throughput event pipelines using Kafka, including partition strategy, consumer group design, and exactly-once processing guarantees
- Build and tune low-latency data layers across Postgres, Redis, and Redis PubSub — ensuring data integrity, cache coherence, and sub-millisecond read paths under peak load
- Implement and enforce resilience patterns across services — backpressure handling, circuit breaking, idempotent retry logic, and graceful degradation under failure conditions
- Contribute to real-time user-facing systems, solving the fan-out problem for live market updates across tens of thousands of concurrent sessions
- Partner with product and engineering leadership to align technical execution with business priorities — contributing to build vs. buy decisions and long-term platform strategy
- Set and uphold engineering standards for observability, schema evolution, testing practices, and deployment patterns across the team — through code reviews, RFCs, and technical documentation
- Mentor and actively develop junior and mid-level engineers, raising the technical floor of the team through pairing, design reviews, and direct feedback
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience with a primary focus on distributed systems and high-concurrency production environments
- Expert-level proficiency in Java or Kotlin and Spring Boot, with a strong command of modern API design — REST, gRPC, and Protobuf
- Deep hands-on experience with Kafka (or Redpanda/Pub Sub) — including internal mechanics, partition strategies, consumer group rebalancing, and delivery guarantees
- Proven ability to diagnose and resolve bottlenecks in asynchronous messaging systems and implement patterns like idempotency, distributed caching, and exactly-once processing
- Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, and cloud-native infrastructure on AWS
- Strong instincts for production reliability — you've been on-call, triaged distributed system failures under pressure, and shipped durable fixes
- Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across teams and guide engineers through complex architectural decisions without direct authority
- Track record of defining success metrics upfront — SLAs, latency budgets, throughput targets — and holding systems accountable to them in production
- Experience with real-time delivery systems — WebSocket fan-out, server-sent events, or pub/sub at scale
- Familiarity with financial platforms, real-time trading systems, or prediction markets
- Experience in a high-growth startup environment where ownership is broad and the technical landscape evolves quickly