Staff Software Engineer - Fanatics Markets

Quick Facts

Staff Engineer, Distributed Systems (Fanatics Markets)

Description

Hands-on, high-ownership role building the event-driven infrastructure that powers real-money trading at scale, keeping markets liquid and the book healthy during peak volume.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and scale distributed systems using Kotlin, Java, and Spring Boot, architecting for traffic spikes and concurrency demands of a live real-money trading platform.
• Own 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 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 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, including consumer group strategies, partition schemes, and delivery guarantees under real production load.
• Demonstrated end-to-end domain ownership: designed, built, operated, and improved systems.
• 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.

Benefits

• For information about benefits, visit https://benefitsatfanatics.com/.
• Salary range: $180,500 - $237,500 USD (varies by country/state via Geographical Compensation Zones).