Senior Engineer, Live Operations

Fanatics; New York (NY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 195,000; Full time

Job summary

Fanatics Live is seeking a Senior Full Stack Engineer to ensure Fanatics Live and Instant Rips run flawlessly in real time. You will diagnose issues during shows, improve dashboards, and build automation that reduces manual steps. This hands-on role offers ownership and impact as the platform scales internationally.

Working hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 1:00 PM to 9:00 PM PT, with opportunities to influence live-ops tooling, incident response, and platform reliability across teams.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience with full stack proficiency across frontend, backend, and infra.
• Hands-on experience with observability tooling (Datadog or equivalent) including dashboards and alerts.
• Experience with incident response or live service support in production.

Responsibilities

• Act as the designated technical responder when a live show or Instant Rip experiences breaks in real time; triage, diagnose, and resolve or escalate with context.
• Own incident response end-to-end from declaring incidents to postmortems.
• Own operational health view: dashboards, alerts, SLOs; instrument the app to catch failures early.
• Partner with account managers, CX, and business teams to build internal tooling for self-service tasks.
• Automate manual operational workflows to remove toil.
• Identify systemic root causes and drive durable fixes rather than one-off mitigations.
• Take ownership of issues impacting seller/buyer experiences and push for durable resolutions.
• Contribute to platform reliability roadmap work.
• Establish runbooks, docs, and escalation paths to scale live support.
• Lead complex reliability initiatives spanning multiple engineering teams.
• Lead architecture and design discussions for live operational capabilities.
• Align technical strategies across product, platform, and infra teams.

Skills

Full stack development

Observability tooling

Incident response

Cloud infrastructure

CI/CD pipelines

Scripting

Communication

Mentorship

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

Tools

Datadog

AWS

Job description

Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform. We ignite the passions of global sports fans and maximize the presence and reach for our hundreds of sports partners globally by offering products and services across Fanatics Commerce, Fanatics Collectibles, and Fanatics Betting & Gaming, allowing sports fans to Buy, Collect, and Bet. Through the Fanatics platform, sports fans can buy licensed fan gear, jerseys, lifestyle and streetwear products, headwear, and hardgoods; collect physical and digital trading cards, sports memorabilia, and other digital assets; and bet as the company builds its Sportsbook and iGaming platform. Fanatics has an established database of over 100 million global sports fans; a global partner network with approximately 900 sports properties, including major national and international professional sports leagues, players associations, teams, colleges, college conferences and retail partners, 2,500 athletes and celebrities, and 200 exclusive athletes; and over 2,000 retail locations, including its Lids retail stores. Our more than 22,000 employees are committed to relentlessly enhancing the fan experience and delighting sports fans globally.

About the Team

Fanatics Live is transforming the digital shopping and collector experience through livestream commerce, creator-led content, and interactive fan engagement. The platform enables collectors to discover, purchase, and engage around collectibles in real time through immersive live experiences.

Live shows and Instant Rips happen in real time, at scale, in front of an engaged audience. Keeping these experiences fast, stable, and seamless for sellers and collectors is core to the product, and we invest in reliability and operational excellence as a first-class engineering discipline.

About the Role

We're seeking a Senior Full Stack Engineer to keep Fanatics Live and Instant Rips running flawlessly when it matters most: live, in the moment, with collectors and sellers transacting in real time.

When a show hits a snag, you are the engineer who diagnoses it and gets it fixed fast. Between shows, you make those moments rarer: sharper dashboards and alerts, tooling that lets operations teams self-serve, automation that replaces manual workarounds, and durable fixes for the root causes behind recurring issues.

This is a hands-on software engineering role, not a support function: your output is code, tooling, and systems that make the platform measurably more reliable. You will be the first engineer dedicated to live operations, which means real ownership, visible impact, and the chance to define how this discipline works as the platform grows internationally.

Working hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 1:00 PM to 9:00 PM PT.

Responsibilities

• Act as the designated technical responder when a live show or Instant Rip experience breaks in real time: triage, diagnose, and either resolve directly or elevate with full context
• Own incident response end to end, from declaring incidents to driving resolution in the moment to closing the loop with postmortems
• Own the operational health view of the live products: build and improve dashboards, alerts, and SLOs, and instrument the application layer to catch failure modes before customers report them
• Partner with account managers, CX, and business teams to identify gaps in internal tooling, and build the tools that let them self-serve common operational tasks
• Automate manual operational workflows out of existence
• Connect the dots across recurring issues to find systemic root causes, and drive durable fixes rather than one-off mitigations
• Take ownership of persistent issues that impact seller and buyer experience, and drive them to durable resolution
• Contribute to platform reliability roadmap work
• Establish the runbooks, documentation, and escalation paths that make live support scalable
• Own and deliver complex reliability initiatives spanning two or more engineering teams.
• Lead architecture and technical-design discussions for live operational capabilities.
• Align technical strategies and incident-prevention priorities across product, platform, and infrastructure teams.
• Provide technical guidance or mentorship and establish recurring knowledge-sharing practices.

Basic Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience with strong full stack proficiency: versatile enough to solve problems across frontend, backend, and infrastructure, working with other engineers as needed
• Hands-on experience with observability tooling (Datadog or equivalent), including building dashboards, defining alert thresholds, and interpreting anomalies under pressure
• Experience with incident response or live service support in a production environment
• Working proficiency with cloud infrastructure (AWS or equivalent), CI/CD pipelines, and scripting for operational automation
• Sound engineering judgment: able to diagnose application-layer issues independently and make calls under time pressure
• Strong cross-functional communication skills; this role interfaces daily with non-engineers
• A bias toward building systems, runbooks, and automation over one-off fixes
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Elixir, GraphQL, React, or real-time streaming technologies (WebSockets, live video)
• Experience supporting live-streaming, marketplace, or e-commerce platforms
• Experience automating operational workflows or building internal admin tooling
• Passion for sports, collectibles, creators, or digital communities

Code-Writing Contribution

This role requires strong hands-on engineering expertise. Debugging, tooling, instrumentation, and root-cause fixes are the core output of this role. Engineers at this level are expected to independently deliver production-ready solutions, contribute to architectural and technical design discussions, and maintain high standards for code quality, reliability, and operability consistent with role expectations.

The salary range represents base pay only and does not include short-term or long-term incentive compensation. This salary range is specific to New York City and may not be applicable to other locations. When determining base pay, as part of a final compensation package, we consider several factors such as location, experience, qualifications, and training. For information about our benefits, please visithttps://benefitsatfanatics.com/

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