Senior Engineering Manager - Market Maker

Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform, and they are seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the Market Making engineering team. This role involves setting technical direction, managing P&L, and ensuring operational excellence for systems that handle real money in trading markets.

Responsibilities:

• Build and lead the Market Making engineering team — recruiting, developing, and retaining engineers across the full pipeline from pricing and order management to PnL infrastructure and Trading UI
• Set technical direction for the team's distributed, event-driven systems built on Java, Kafka, Redis, Postgres, and Kubernetes — ensuring architectural decisions hold up as we expand to new sports, market types, and exchange venues
• Own the team's delivery and operational excellence: define engineering goals around availability, performance, and deployment cadence, and hold the team accountable to outcomes — not just output
• Partner with our trading team and FMX product to align roadmap priorities, balancing near-term exchange coverage (World Cup, NFL) with longer-term platform investments like in-house pricing models and exchange abstraction
• Build the operational foundation for live trading: on-call rotation, incident response runbooks, kill switch protocols, and escalation paths for P&L-impacting events
• Develop genuine fluency in our trading economics — spreads, adverse selection, inventory risk, hold rate — and use that context to make better resourcing and prioritization decisions
• Advocate for the team across the organization, driving clarity on P&L ownership, headcount, and cross-team dependencies with Trading, Product, Finance, and Legal

Requirements:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years managing engineering teams
• Proven success leading teams that build and operate distributed, event-driven systems at scale — with strong familiarity with Java/Kotlin, Kafka, Redis, Postgres, and Kubernetes
• Track record of building engineering organizations that deliver business-critical systems with both reliability and speed — ideally in a startup or high-growth environment where the org was still taking shape
• Strong ability to create clarity in ambiguous, complex environments — across technical architecture, team structure, and stakeholder alignment
• Excellent communication and leadership skills, with the ability to influence both engineers and non-technical stakeholders including trading, finance, and executive leadership
• Comfortable owning a real P&L: you can read a daily snapshot, understand what drove the outcome, and make engineering decisions informed by commercial context
• Background in real-time trading systems, financial infrastructure, or prediction markets — or strong adjacent experience in high-throughput, low-latency platforms where correctness has direct financial consequences
• Familiarity with quantitative concepts: pricing models, spread logic, adverse selection, or inventory management
• Experience standing up on-call programs, SLAs, and operational frameworks for systems that can't afford downtime