Senior Distributed Systems Engineer – Real-Time Trading

Fanatics Betting & Gaming; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Fanatics Betting & Gaming is seeking a Staff Engineer to lead the Distributed Systems team in New York. You will own the event-driven infrastructure powering real-money trading, writing scalable, high-availability code and shaping the platform's architectural direction.

You will partner with product and engineering leadership, drive end-to-end ownership, and raise the bar for performance, reliability, and maintainability in a fast-paced, high-stakes environment.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems in production.
• 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 internal mechanics and guarantees.
• End-to-end domain ownership — designed, built, operated, and improved systems, not just shipped features.
• Strong performance instincts — latency and throughput optimization in live trading environments.
• Clear communicator — capable of writing design docs and explaining trade-offs to engineers and traders.
• High tolerance for ambiguity and rapid decision-making in fast-moving teams.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and scale distributed systems for a real-money trading platform, handling high traffic and concurrency.
• Own development of high-throughput event pipelines using Kafka, including partition strategy and consumer group design.
• Build low-latency event streams with data integrity and cache coherence under peak load.
• Collaborate with product and engineering leadership to align cross-domain decisions while preserving architectural integrity.
• Diagnose production issues in a live trading environment, distinguishing pricing latency and other anomalies.
• Identify performance bottlenecks and technical risks before they impact trading operations.
• Raise engineering standards through design docs, reviews, and scalable patterns.

Skills

Distributed systems

Java or Kotlin

Spring Boot

Kafka

Event-driven architecture

Performance optimization

Communication

Ownership

Tools

Kafka Ecosystem

REST

gRPC

Protobuf

Docker

Job description

Fanatics Betting & Gaming is seeking a Staff Engineer to lead the Distributed Systems team in New York. You will own the event-driven infrastructure powering real-money trading, writing scalable, high-availability code and shaping the platform's architectural direction.

You will partner with product and engineering leadership, drive end-to-end ownership, and raise the bar for performance, reliability, and maintainability in a fast-paced, high-stakes environment.