Senior Software Engineer - Distributed Systems, Fanatics Markets

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

Job summary

Fanatics is looking for a Sr Software Engineer in New York to join the Distributed Systems team. You'll design and build scalable distributed systems, ensuring resilience and performance under peak traffic during real-money trading.

This role requires strong experience in modern software engineering with Java or Kotlin and a deep understanding of event-driven architecture and data processing. The salary range is competitive, reflecting your expertise in a high-demand field.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience in distributed systems.
• Expert-level proficiency in Java or Kotlin and Spring Boot.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka.
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and scale distributed systems using Kotlin, Java, and Spring Boot.
• Own development and optimization of high-throughput event pipelines with Kafka.
• Implement resilience patterns across services.
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers in technical practices.

Skills

Distributed systems

High-concurrency data processing

Java

Kotlin

Spring Boot

Kafka

Kubernetes

AWS

Job description

The Opportunity

As a Sr Software Engineer on our Distributed Systems team, you'll be at the core of what makes Fanatics Markets work — the event-driven infrastructure that powers real-money trading at scale. This is a role for an engineer who moves fluidly between hands-on coding and architectural influence: someone who can design a system that handles massive traffic spikes during live events, then roll up their sleeves and build it.

You'll work alongside some of the most experienced distributed systems engineers in the industry, owning meaningful technical decisions and directly shaping how the platform scales over the next several years. If you thrive at the intersection of high-throughput systems, low-latency design, and technical leadership — this is your seat.

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 PubSub — 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.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with a primary focus on distributed systems and high-concurrency production environments.
• Expert-level proficiency in Java or Kotlin and Spring Boot, with a strong command of modern API design — REST, gRPC, and Protobuf.
• Deep hands-on experience with Kafka (or Redpanda/Pub Sub) — including internal mechanics, partition strategies, consumer group rebalancing, and delivery guarantees.
• Proven ability to diagnose and resolve bottlenecks in asynchronous messaging systems and implement patterns like idempotency, distributed caching, and exactly-onal processing.
• 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.

Preferred

• Experience with real-time delivery systems — WebSocket fan-out, server-sent events, or pub/sub at scale.
• Familiarity with financial platforms, real-time trading systems, or prediction markets.
• Experience in a high-growth startup environment where ownership is broad and the technical landscape evolves quickly.

Salary Range: $152,000 - $200,000 USD