Staff Platform Engineer, Data Storage - Core

Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform. They are seeking a Staff Platform Storage Engineer to manage critical data infrastructure, including PostgreSQL databases and Kafka streaming platforms, while ensuring reliability and performance across teams.

Responsibilities:

• Own database liaison responsibility for a portfolio of production PostgreSQL/RDS instances — query review, schema change approval, performance tuning, and incident triage for the teams built on top of them
• Operate and evolve our Kafka/MSK streaming platform: topic lifecycle management via GitOps, cluster health across environments, and CDC (Debezium) pipeline reliability
• Build and maintain self-service tooling that lets product teams provision database and streaming resources without a manual ticket queue
• Drive platform stability projects — operator/version upgrades, root-cause fixes for recurring operational issues, and proactive capacity/cost optimization across the database and streaming fleet
• Act as the technical escalation point for cross-team incidents where the root cause traces back to shared data infrastructure (replication lag, connection exhaustion, CPU/throughput issues)
• Represent Platform Storage in cross-org infrastructure initiatives and standardization efforts
• Mentor engineers and participate in on-call rotations

Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience in platform, infrastructure, or database engineering, with deep hands-on production experience running PostgreSQL (RDS) at scale
• Strong experience operating Kafka (MSK or self-managed) in production, including topic management and CDC/event-streaming pipelines
• Strong SQL fluency — comfortable diagnosing query performance issues and reviewing schema changes for teams you don't sit inside of
• Infrastructure as Code expertise (Terraform)
• Experience owning production database reliability across multiple downstream teams simultaneously — able to prioritize across a portfolio, not just one system
• Strong cross-team communicator; this role is equal parts infrastructure engineering and technical partnership with the teams you support
• Experience with GitOps-managed Kubernetes operators (Strimzi or equivalent) for stream infrastructure
• MongoDB or DynamoDB operational experience
• Experience with pgbouncer, connection pooling, and query-level performance diagnostics
• Prior work on platform cost optimization initiatives at multi-cluster scale
• Exposure to regulated or high-availability environments (gaming, fintech, or similar)