Staff Backend Engineer - Foundations

The Role

As a Backend Engineer at Fanatics, you'll design, develop, test, and maintain scalable, high-quality systems to deliver exceptional customer experiences. We own the Fanatics App, the brand-forward application of Fanatics that encompasses elements of all of our different brands and businesses. 

The Fanatics App brings together Free to Play sports games, live events, ecommerce, and new product experiences to deliver a new Sports platform. Fundamentally, we are one team in everything we do from the user experience to coding and architecture. In order to deliver on our Customer Promise, we use best in class technologies; thus allowing platforms to be as up to date as possible so that we can rapidly deliver and innovate in this exciting new market.

Responsibilities

• Drive the development, testing, documentation, and deployment of high-quality, scalable software into production
• Develop a comprehensive understanding of the industry, product, architecture, and roadmap, leveraging this knowledge to shape team strategy and influence the direction of the organization
• Lead the end-to-end technical execution of complex features and systems, from ideation and architecture to deployment and refinement
• Define and enforce engineering principles, guidelines, and best practices 
• Partner closely with product, design, and other stakeholders to make high-impact technical decisions that align with both business goals and long-term scalability
• Lead incident resolution as part of the on-call rotation, ensuring swift diagnosis and remediation of critical software issues
• Demonstrate ability to lead or drive triage of difficult reliability issues and produce clear root-cause analysis.
• Partner Cross functionally, and across multiple teams to bring complex features and projects from prototype to production.
• Contribute to engineering excellence through documentation, tooling improvements, code reviews, and knowledge sharing. 
• Steer team planning and design discussions, introducing innovative approaches to solve technical challenges and optimize design patterns
• Champion improvements to software quality, testability, operational metrics, and team documentation, setting a higher standard for the organization
• Mentor and coach engineers at all levels, fostering a culture of continuous learning and professional growth across the team
• Be open to occasional travel to Fanatics offices and other locations for conferences, events, meetings, and team-building activities

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience building highly scalable, performant and evolvable backend distributed systems; proficiency in Spring with Kotlin and/or Java is a plus.
• Demonstrated ability to drive best practices in backend development and mentor others in effective coding and architectural strategies, such as clean code, hexagonal/layered architectures, domain driven design and other design and architectural patterns
• Expertise in messaging technologies such as Kafka, Kinesis, Flink or Amazon SQS, with a solid understanding of event-driven architectures.
• Knowledge of observability practices, including logging, monitoring, and tracing in distributed systems.
• Expertise in Agile software delivery, with a track record of modeling and driving process improvements across teams, and ability to collaborate cross-functionally across diverse teams within large enterprise environments, driving alignment and shared success.
• Excellent communication skills, capable of conveying complex technical concepts clearly and effectively to diverse audiences, including engineers, executives, and non-technical stakeholders.
• Team-first mentality, with a willingness to do what it takes to get the job done and a desire to strive for better.
• Thrives in a high-growth environment where priorities evolve regularly and decisions are made quickly.

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong Experience building segmentation services, high available - low latency applications.
• Highly effective with Kotlin, Java and/or Go
• Comfortable working with Cloud Native and Infrastructure as Code, like Kubernetes, Helm and Terraform
• Ability to work in diverse codebases, both legacy and greenfield, in different languages and environments
• Experience with CRM technologies such as SFMC, Braze, etc.

If you possess some of these qualifications but not all of them, we still encourage you to apply!

The salary range for this position is $180,500 to $237,500, which represents base pay only and does not include short-term or long-term incentive compensation. When determining base pay, as part of a final compensation package, we consider several factors such as location, experience, qualifications, and training. Remote employees may also be eligible for a home office setup stipend.