Staff Backend Engineer

Fanatics Collectibles; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Fanatics Collectibles is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to design and build core platform services for the Backend Platform team. You will work with Client Platform, QA, and infrastructure to define architecture for real-time activity, money movement, and identity at scale.

You will own end-to-end initiatives, define API and event contracts, and drive reliability, security, and privacy by design. The role emphasizes mentoring, design reviews, and practical use of AI-assisted tooling to boost

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend experience in high-traffic systems.
• Deep expertise in Java, Go, or Python.
• Experience with event-driven architectures and streaming systems.
• Hands-on AWS and security/privacy focus.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build core platform services for the Backend Platform team.
• Own end-to-end initiatives from concept to production rollout.
• Define clean, versioned API and event contracts with client engineers and partner teams.
• Partner with DevOps/SRE on CI/CD, observability, and cost reduction.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Event-driven design

REST/GRPC

Java/Go/Python

AWS

Security & privacy

Team collaboration

Tools

Kafka

Kinesis

Elasticsearch/OpenSearch

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

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.

Team: Backend Platform, Fanatics Collectibles Level: Staff Type: Full-time

About Us

Fanatics Collectibles builds the ultimate platform for collectors, spanning Fanatics Collect, Fanatics Live, and Topps Digital. We are in the middle of a next-generation platform build: unifying our collector experience across products, and replacing point solutions with shared services that every product team can build on.

As a Staff Backend Engineer on the Backend Platform team, you will design and build the foundational services behind that effort, working hand-in-hand with the Client Platform (iOS, Android, Web), QA, and infrastructure teams. You'll set technical direction for systems that carry real-time collector activity, money movement, and identity at scale.

What You'll Do

Architect & Build Core Platform Services

• Lead design and delivery of shared platform services over the next year, including a unified message bus, identity and user unification across Live and Collect, wallet, checkout, search, and discovery.
• Design event-driven architectures and streaming pipelines that move us from fragmented, product-specific events to a single, reliable, well-governed event backbone, including phased migration of existing producers and consumers.
• Own availability, scalability, security, and data privacy for core backend systems, including consent, PII handling, and compliance-by-design.

Own Key Initiatives End to End

• Spearhead zero-to-one initiatives from concept through production rollout, writing the 1-pager and technical design, breaking down work, and coordinating delivery across teams.
• Define clean, versioned API and event contracts with client engineers and partner teams so Live, Collect, and Topps Digital can converge on shared capabilities.
• Identify technical risk early, make sound build-vs-buy and sequencing tradeoffs, and communicate them clearly to engineering and product leadership.

Operational Excellence

• Partner with DevOps/SRE on CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, observability, and alerting. Define SLOs and drive down latency and cost on high-throughput services.
• Build for safe change: gradual rollouts, feature flags, experimentation, and zero-downtime migrations.

Raise the Engineering Bar

• Establish standards for code quality, testing, performance, and documentation. Lead architecture and design reviews.
• Mentor engineers, and help us hire and calibrate. We value candidates who have served as interview bar-raisers or loop leads.
• Explore how AI-assisted tooling and agentic workflows can improve both our products and our engineering productivity, and help the team adopt them pragmatically.

What We're Looking For

Experience & Expertise

• 8+ years building backend services in high-traffic, distributed environments, with a record of owning systems at Staff scope.
• Deep expertise in at least one major backend language (Java, Go, Python, or similar) and its ecosystem.
• Strong experience designing event-driven and streaming systems (Kafka, Kinesis, SQS/SNS, or equivalent), including partitioning, ordering, delivery guarantees, idempotency, and schema evolution.
• Solid grounding in microservices, REST/gRPC (GraphQL a plus), and both relational and NoSQL data stores. Experience with search technologies such as Elasticsearch or OpenSearch is a plus.
• Hands-on experience building and operating services on AWS, including serverless and managed services (e.g., Lambda, SQS/SNS, Kinesis, DynamoDB, S3).
• Experience with identity and account concerns (OAuth, account linking, authentication/authorization) and with privacy and compliance engineering (GDPR, tokenization, encryption, consent) is a strong plus.
• Experience in payments, wallet, checkout, or other transactional, money-adjacent systems is a plus, as is experience in marketplace or commerce domains.

DevOps Mindset

• Comfort owning services in production: containers (Docker) and an orchestration or serverless runtime (Kubernetes, ECS, or Lambda), plus infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or CDK).
• Familiarity with CI/CD (blue-green or canary deployment) and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK, distributed tracing).
• Track record of performance tuning and reliability work, with measurable results in latency, scale, or cost.
• Proven ability to work across product, client (mobile and web), QA, and infrastructure teams, and to partner with external platforms or vendors where needed.
• Strong written and verbal communication, with experience running design discussions and writing technical specs and 1-pagers that drive decisions.
• Track record of leading zero-to-one initiatives and guiding other engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and coaching.
• Ability to influence technical direction and build consensus across teams in a fast-paced environment.

Why Join

You will have real ownership over the foundation of a platform that spans multiple products and a passionate collector community, with visibility to senior engineering leadership and room to shape how we build.

The salary range represents base pay only and does not include short-term or long-term incentive compensation. 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 visit https://benefitsatfanatics.com/

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Fanatics Collectibles’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection. As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measure the effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categories is as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.