Senior Distributed Systems Engineer for Real-Time Trading

Fanatics Inc.; New York (NY); On-site; USD 152,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Fanatics Inc. is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Distributed Systems team within Fanatics Markets in New York. You will design and build event-driven, high-throughput systems that power real-money trading at scale, bridging hands-on coding with architectural influence.

You will own Kafka pipelines, low-latency data layers with Postgres/Redis, and resiliency patterns. Collaboration with product and leadership sets the direction, while mentoring junior engineers helps lift the

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with a focus on distributed systems and high-concurrency production environments.
• Expert-level proficiency in Java or Kotlin and Spring Boot, with a strong command of REST, gRPC, and Protobuf.
• Deep hands-on experience with Kafka (or Redpanda/Pub Sub) - including partition strategies, consumer group design, and delivery guarantees.
• 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.

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 Pub/Sub - 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

Java/Kotlin

Spring Boot

Kafka

Kubernetes

AWS

REST/gRPC

Protobuf

System design

On-call reliability

Mentoring

Tools

Terraform

Redis

PostgreSQL

Git

CI/CD

Job description

Fanatics Inc. is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Distributed Systems team within Fanatics Markets in New York. You will design and build event-driven, high-throughput systems that power real-money trading at scale, bridging hands-on coding with architectural influence.

You will own Kafka pipelines, low-latency data layers with Postgres/Redis, and resiliency patterns. Collaboration with product and leadership sets the direction, while mentoring junior engineers helps lift the