Senior Software Engineer - Distributed Systems, Fanatics Markets

Fanatics is building a global digital sports platform spanning commerce, collectibles, and betting and gaming. Fanatics Markets is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design, build, and scale event-driven distributed systems that support high-throughput, low-latency real-money trading. The role also involves influencing architecture, improving reliability and observability, partnering with leadership, and mentoring engineers.

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