Senior Engineering Manager - Fanatics Markets

Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform, and they are seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to build and lead the Market Making engineering team. This role involves owning technical direction, team culture, and delivery for systems where real money is involved, while partnering with the trading team and managing operational foundations for live trading.

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