Staff Engineer - Backend/Java

fanaticsinc; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Fanatics, Inc. is seeking an experienced engineering leader to drive backend systems architecture and production operations for customer-facing digital products in the United States.

You will guide architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, and production readiness, setting engineering standards across multiple teams. You will translate product roadmaps into scalable designs, establish quality and observability practices, and lead cross-functional collaboration with product, design, and

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience building scalable distributed backend systems.
• Strong backend architecture, and clean, maintainable designs.
• Knowledge of logging, monitoring, and tracing in distributed environments.
• Proven Agile delivery and cross-team collaboration.
• Ability to explain trade-offs clearly to engineers, leaders, and nontechnical partners.
• Collaborative, adaptable approach in a fast-moving environment.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical delivery of complex backend systems across design, implementation, testing, deployment, and refinement.
• Translate product needs into architectural choices that support scale and long-term maintainability.
• Establish practices for software quality, testability, observability, and documentation.
• Partner with product, design, and engineering stakeholders to coordinate work across teams.
• Help resolve production incidents through on-call rotation and drive remediation.
• Facilitate design discussions and code reviews, remove blockers, and coach engineers at different levels.

Skills

Backend architecture

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Agile delivery

Communication

Java/Kotlin

Backend development

Tools

Spring

Java

Kotlin

Kafka

Amazon SQS

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

Role overview

Provide hands-on technical leadership for backend systems and shared capabilities that support customer-facing digital products. The role spans architecture, implementation, and production operations, while setting engineering standards and guiding complex work across teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical delivery of complex backend systems, from initial design through implementation, testing, deployment, and refinement.
• Translate product and roadmap needs into architectural choices that support scale and long-term maintainability.
• Establish and reinforce practices for software quality, testability, observability, and clear technical documentation.
• Partner with product, design, and engineering stakeholders to make decisions and coordinate work across teams.
• Help resolve production incidents through an on-call rotation and drive diagnosis and remediation.
• Facilitate design discussions and code reviews, remove blockers, and coach engineers at different levels.

Requirements

• 7 or more years of experience building scalable, performant distributed backend systems.
• Strong backend engineering and architecture skills, including familiarity with clean code, layered or hexagonal approaches, and domain-driven design. Spring, Java, or Kotlin experience is useful.
• Knowledge of logging, monitoring, and tracing in distributed environments.
• Track record of effective Agile delivery and process improvement across teams.
• Ability to explain technical trade-offs clearly to engineers, leaders, and nontechnical partners.
• Collaborative, adaptable approach in a fast-moving environment.

Nice to have

• Background in sports, gaming, or content delivery.
• Experience with Kotlin, Java, or Go; Kafka or Amazon SQS; and event-driven systems.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Ability to contribute across both legacy and newly built systems.

Benefits and work setup

The listing references full-time employment and benefits but does not specify the benefit package or work location.