Senior Principal Engineer: Real-Time Distributed Systems

Fanatics Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 201,000 - 331,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Home office stipend

Remote‑friendly work model

Job summary

Fanatics Markets is seeking a Senior Principal Software Engineer to serve as the technical North Star for its event‑driven architecture. You will shape latency, scalability, and distributed systems design, participating in major technical decisions rather than a pure IC role.

You will set architecture standards, mentor senior engineers, and align technical work with product and business goals, while representing Fanatics Markets externally through talks and open source contributions.

Qualifications

• 15+ years building highly scalable, fault‑tolerant distributed systems.
• Proven architecture standards adopted across engineering orgs.
• Ability to translate deep technical complexity into actionable plans for multiple teams.
• Strong track record elevating engineers and driving delivery.

Responsibilities

• Set long‑term architecture strategy for our event‑driven platform.
• Drive strategically critical initiatives across multiple teams and establish standard patterns.
• Escalation point for complex distributed systems problems.
• Mentor and elevate senior engineers to raise the technical ceiling.
• Own trade‑offs between delivery speed and architectural integrity.
• Define and enforce the Fanatics Standard for patterns, observability, and resilience.
• Audit and simplify the codebase to reduce risk and debt.
• Represent Fanatics Markets externally through talks and open source contributions.

Skills

Leadership

Strategic thinking

Cross‑functional communication

Tools

Kotlin

Java

Kafka

Redis

Kubernetes

AWS

Postgres

Job description

Fanatics Markets is seeking a Senior Principal Software Engineer to serve as the technical North Star for its event‑driven architecture. You will shape latency, scalability, and distributed systems design, participating in major technical decisions rather than a pure IC role.

You will set architecture standards, mentor senior engineers, and align technical work with product and business goals, while representing Fanatics Markets externally through talks and open source contributions.