Staff Distributed Systems Engineer — Real-Time Trading

Fanatics; New York (NY); On-site; USD 181,000 - 238,000; Full time

Job summary

Fanatics is seeking a Staff Engineer for its Distributed Systems team within Fanatics Markets. You will own the event‑driven infrastructure powering real‑money trading, writing code with Kotlin/Java and Spring Boot, and shaping system design for peak load periods.

You will partner with leaders to align cross‑domain decisions, ensure low latency, and sustain system reliability while scaling the platform for growth. This role is based in New York and involves close collaboration with trading teams.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building scalable, fault‑tolerant distributed systems in production.
• Expert‑level proficiency in Java or Kotlin and Spring Boot, with modern API design (REST, gRPC, Protobuf).
• Deep hands‑on experience with Kafka, including partition strategies and delivery guarantees.
• End‑to‑end domain ownership — designed, built, operated, and improved systems, not just shipped features.
• Strong performance instincts — latency, throughput and data pipeline efficiency.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and scale distributed systems using Kotlin, Java, and Spring Boot for a real‑money trading platform.
• Own the development and optimization of high‑throughput event pipelines using Kafka and exactly‑once processing.
• Design and build low‑latency event streams with data integrity and cache coherence under peak load.
• Collaborate with product and engineering leadership to align cross‑domain technical decisions and maintain architecture.
• Diagnose and durably fix production issues in a live trading environment, identifying latency and misfires.
• Identify performance bottlenecks and risks before they impact trading operations.
• Raise engineering standards through design docs and architecture reviews.

Skills

Java

Kotlin

Spring Boot

Kafka

Event-driven

REST

gRPC

Protobuf

Performance

Design docs

Tools

Kafka

Pub/Sub

WebSocket

Protobuf

Job description

Fanatics is seeking a Staff Engineer for its Distributed Systems team within Fanatics Markets. You will own the event‑driven infrastructure powering real‑money trading, writing code with Kotlin/Java and Spring Boot, and shaping system design for peak load periods.

You will partner with leaders to align cross‑domain decisions, ensure low latency, and sustain system reliability while scaling the platform for growth. This role is based in New York and involves close collaboration with trading teams.