Principal Engineer - Platform Architect & Strategy

Fanatics; New York (NY); On-site; USD 240,000 - 299,000; Full time

Job summary

Fanatics is seeking a Principal Engineer for its Strategic Engineering Group in New York to serve as the technical North Star. You will set standards, shape how we scale, and lead major architectural decisions across teams, including latency, distributed systems, and platform resilience.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with Product, Security, and IT, and drive cross-vertical initiatives. The role blends hands-on design with strategic influence, including external engagement and

Qualifications

• 15+ years of overall software engineering experience, including 10+ years operating at Senior Staff or above.
• Experience leading programs that span multiple teams or verticals over a multi-quarter timeline, with minimal oversight.
• Proven ability to identify business-critical problems and build the case for new investment, independent of being assigned the work.
• Track record of setting technical patterns or standards that other teams have adopted without your direct involvement.
• Experience mentoring Staff/Senior Staff engineers and contributing to their growth toward technical leadership.
• Strong track record leading through incidents or operational risk, with a focus on systemic hardening rather than one-off fixes.
• Excellent communication skills, with experience building consensus across both engineering and business/executive stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Set the long-term architecture strategy for our event-driven platform, proactively eliminating risks and simplifying the codebase to prevent systemic technical debt.
• Drive strategically critical, cross-vertical initiatives. Establish the patterns and trade-off frameworks that become the standard for building, operating, and scaling systems.
• Serve as an ultimate escalation point for complex distributed systems problems, providing technical guidance to resolve high-stakes issues and unblock teams.
• Mentor and elevate senior engineers and technical leaders, fostering a culture of accountability and raising the technical ceiling of the entire organization.
• Partner with product and business leaders to define technical strategy, navigating ambiguity to build consensus on high-impact initiatives.
• Champion organizational excellence by setting standards for testing, observability, incident response, and platform resilience.
• Represent the organization externally through technical writing, conference talks, and open-source contributions, bringing external innovation in and sharing our progress with the broader community.

Skills

Senior leadership

Distributed systems

Cross-team programs

Mentoring Staff engineers

Technical communication

Incident management

Job description

Fanatics is seeking a Principal Engineer for its Strategic Engineering Group in New York to serve as the technical North Star. You will set standards, shape how we scale, and lead major architectural decisions across teams, including latency, distributed systems, and platform resilience.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with Product, Security, and IT, and drive cross-vertical initiatives. The role blends hands-on design with strategic influence, including external engagement and