Staff Engineer - Backend/Kotlin

Overview 

As a Backend Staff Engineer at Fanatics Core, you are a recognized technical leader. You operate both strategically and hands-on while leading ambitious projects, and your solutions set the standard for the team. Your bold decisions balance immediate business needs with long-term technical excellence. Through your leadership, you cultivate a culture of excellence and innovation that leaves a lasting impact on both your immediate team and the broader mobile team. Lastly, you are user-obsessed and know how to drive features from the backend all the way to the frontend.

We own the Fanatics App, the mobile app at  Fanatics that encompasses elements from  all of our different brands and businesses. The Fanatics App brings together Free to Play games, live events, ecommerce, and new product experiences to deliver a best-in-class  Sports platform. Fundamentally, we are one team in everything we do, from the user experience to coding and architecture. We aim to deliver on our Customer Promise by delighting our millions of monthly active users.

Responsibilities

• Drive the development, testing, documentation, and deployment of high-quality, scalable software into production
• Develop a comprehensive understanding of the industry, product, 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
• Proactively identify and remove roadblocks, occasionally collaborating cross-team collaboration to maintain momentum on complex projects
• Conduct and elevate code reviews, sharing expertise to enhance code quality
• 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
• 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 in the sports industry, gaming and content delivery
• Highly effective with Kotlin, Java and/or Go
• Expertise in messaging technologies such as Kafka or Amazon SQS, with a solid understanding of event-driven architectures.
• 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

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

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Salary Range 144000 - 235000 USD