Staff Backend Engineer - Kotlin & Systems Architecture

Fanatics Inc.; New York (NY); Remote; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Fanatics Inc. is seeking a Backend Staff Engineer to lead strategic and hands-on work on the Fanatics Core platform.

You will own scalable backend systems, influence architecture, and mentor engineers while collaborating with product, design, and other teams to deliver high-impact features. This role requires 7+ years of backend experience, strong knowledge of Spring with Kotlin/Java, and proven ability to drive clean code, observability, and Agile delivery.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building scalable backend distributed systems with Spring and Kotlin/Java.
• Mentor others in clean code, hexagonal architectures, DDD and related patterns.
• Observability practices: logging, monitoring, tracing in distributed systems.
• Agile delivery with cross-functional collaboration across large enterprise environments.
• Excellent communication to diverse audiences including executives and engineers.
• Team-first mentality and ability to adapt in a high-growth environment.

Responsibilities

• Drive development, testing, documentation, and deployment of high-quality software into production.
• Shape team strategy by understanding industry, product, and roadmap.
• Lead end-to-end execution of complex features from ideation to deployment.
• Define and enforce engineering principles and best practices.
• Collaborate with product/design to align with business goals and scalability.
• Lead incident resolution in on-call rotation and drive rapid remediation.
• Mentor engineers and foster continuous learning across the team.
• Occasional travel to Fanatics offices for conferences and events.

Skills

Backend system design

Mentoring

Agile delivery

Excellent communication

Team-oriented

Tools

Spring with Kotlin/Java

Kafka

Amazon SQS

Kubernetes

Helm

Terraform

Go

Job description

Fanatics Inc. is seeking a Backend Staff Engineer to lead strategic and hands-on work on the Fanatics Core platform.

You will own scalable backend systems, influence architecture, and mentor engineers while collaborating with product, design, and other teams to deliver high-impact features. This role requires 7+ years of backend experience, strong knowledge of Spring with Kotlin/Java, and proven ability to drive clean code, observability, and Agile delivery.