Staff Software Engineer - Fanatics Markets

Fanatics is building a global digital sports platform spanning commerce, collectibles, and betting and gaming. Fanatics Markets is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for its Distributed Systems team to design, build, and operate event-driven infrastructure powering high-throughput, real-money trading. The role focuses on distributed systems, Kafka pipelines, performance, production reliability, and technical leadership.

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
• Design and build systems that process high-throughput, low-latency event streams — ensuring data integrity, cache coherence, and sub-millisecond read paths under peak load
• Partner with product and engineering leadership to align cross-domain technical decisions, contributing domain expertise while preserving architectural integrity
• Diagnose and durably fix production issues in a live trading environment, distinguishing pricing latency, strategy misfires, mapping errors, and adverse selection patterns
• Proactively identify performance bottlenecks and technical risk before they affect trading operations
• Raise engineering standards through design docs, code/architecture reviews, and patterns that scale as product expands

Requirements:

• 7+ years building scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems in production
• 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
• Deep experience with event-driven architecture and async messaging — consumer group strategies, partition schemes, delivery guarantees under real production load
• Demonstrated end-to-end domain ownership — designed, built, operated, and improved systems, not just shipped features
• Strong performance instincts — latency, throughput, and data pipeline efficiency, with a track record of measuring what matters
• Clear, direct communicator — comfortable writing a design doc, explaining a production failure to a trader, or debating trade-offs with a principal engineer
• High tolerance for ambiguity and speed — comfortable deploying daily and making good calls while the spec is still being written
• 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
• Familiarity with FIX protocol or exchange connectivity patterns