Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform and is seeking a Senior Software Engineer on their Distributed Systems team. The role involves designing and building distributed systems that power real-money trading, while also influencing architectural decisions and mentoring junior 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
Skills
- 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
Benefits
- In addition to the base and bonus, full-time employment, and more. For information about our benefits, please visit https://benefitsatfanatics.com/
Company Overview
Fanatics is a global sports platform reimagining the fan experience across gear, trading cards, sports betting, content, events, and more. It was founded in 2011, and is headquartered in New York, New York, USA, with a workforce of 10001+ employees. Its website is http://www.fanaticsinc.com.Company H1B Sponsorship
Fanatics has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 2 in 2021. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.