Principal Engineer — Strategic Systems & Platform Lead

Fanatics Collectibles; United States; Remote; USD 240,000 - 299,000; Full time

Job summary

Fanatics is seeking a Principal Engineer for the Strategic Engineering Group. You set the standard, make hard calls, and shape how we scale for the next several years.

This isn’t a heads-down IC role; it’s a seat at the table for major technical decisions across Fanatics Core, from sub-millisecond latency on Kafka/Redis to distributed systems design. You will work with Product Engineering, Security, and Infrastructure IT, lead initiatives across teams, mentor staff, and help instill a culture of

Qualifications

• 15+ years of software engineering experience with senior-level leadership.
• 10+ years in Senior Staff or equivalent, owning cross-team technical design.
• Proven ability to define and drive large-scale architectural decisions.

Responsibilities

• Set long-term architecture strategy for event-driven platform.
• Drive cross-vertical initiatives and establish standard patterns.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical bar.
• Provide guidance during high-stakes incidents and outages.
• Collaborate with product and business leaders to align technical strategy.
• Represent the organization through technical writing and external forums.
• Champion testing, observability, and platform resilience.

Skills

Technical leadership

Distributed systems design

Mentoring staff engineers

Incident response & resilience

Cross-functional collaboration

Architectural decision making

Tools

Kafka

Redis

AWS

Golang/Java

Job description

Fanatics is seeking a Principal Engineer for the Strategic Engineering Group. You set the standard, make hard calls, and shape how we scale for the next several years.

This isn’t a heads-down IC role; it’s a seat at the table for major technical decisions across Fanatics Core, from sub-millisecond latency on Kafka/Redis to distributed systems design. You will work with Product Engineering, Security, and Infrastructure IT, lead initiatives across teams, mentor staff, and help instill a culture of