Staff Engineer - Backend Kotlin

Fanatics Inc

New York (NY)

On-site

USD 144,000 - 205,000

Full time

14 days+

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Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, Vision Insurance

401K

Paid Time Off

GymPass

Pet Insurance

Family Care Benefits

Job summary

A leading gaming and sports technology firm is seeking a Staff Engineer, Client Services, to join their innovative team in New York. This role involves designing scalable backend services leveraging Kotlin, mentoring engineers, and leading technical excellence across the organization. Ideal candidates will have over 7 years of experience, expertise in relevant technologies, and a passion for building high-performance solutions. Competitive salary and benefits, including bonuses and professional development opportunities, are offered.

Qualifications

7+ years of experience designing and building highly scalable backend services.
Expertise with Kotlin or deep knowledge of Java willing to transition.
Experience with modern backend frameworks such as Spring Boot.

Responsibilities

Lead the planning, design, and technical development of major product features.
Own and drive technical excellence across the Client Services domain.
Conduct thorough technical design and code reviews.

Skills

Kotlin

Java

Agile Methodology

Communication

Teamwork

Education

Bachelor’s degree or professional certification

Tools

Spring Boot

Cloud Infrastructure

Job description

As a Staff Engineer, Client Services at Fanatics Betting & Gaming (FBG), you’ll join the Sportsbook Client team—an innovative, culturally driven group powering the rapidly growing Fanatics Sportsbook app. The team owns the core customer experience, from showcasing markets, events, and player statistics to rendering highly dynamic, real-time data. Together, we build features that elevate performance, usability, and engagement, driving customer loyalty through an exceptional user experience.

As a Staff Engineer at FBG, you are a seasoned contributor and technical leader, known for your ability to build scalable, high-impact solutions that drive the business forward. You combine deep hands‑on expertise with a strong architectural mindset, delivering results across mobile systems. You are expected to set the technical direction, drive engineering excellence across multiple client‑facing teams, and empower engineers to deliver features at the highest quality. You play a key role in shaping the future of our technology stack while mentoring others and setting a high bar for engineering excellence.

We embrace principles of data‑driven development, operational excellence, and continuous process optimization to deliver a stable, scalable platform. Central to our strategy is Kotlin, and Kotlin Multiplatform, which empowers us to deliver high‑quality features quickly and consistently across multiple ecosystems. By focusing on object‑oriented design, modern coding practices, open‑source frameworks, and third‑party platform integrations, we continuously innovate and deliver at speed in this exciting and fast‑moving market.

Responsibilities

Lead the planning, design, and technical development of major product features, from inception through deployment, ensuring alignment with overall platform strategy.
Own and drive technical excellence, including defining and scaling best practices in code quality, system design, and testing across the Client Services domain and peer teams.
Conduct exceptionally thorough and constructive technical design and code reviews to maintain the highest bar for quality, reliability, and security.
Mentor and empower engineers across multiple teams, fostering a culture of technical ownership, innovation, and continuous improvement.
Help your team define and adhere to the principles, guidelines, and best practices of our engineering strategy and actively drive adoption across related client teams.
Lead end‑to‑end delivery of multi‑team projects, coordinating across engineering, product, and design. Effectively represent the team's plans, updates, and technical decisions in cross‑functional planning and review forums.
Define and lead the testing strategy for complex client‑side features and systems, promoting a culture of quality and ensuring systems are testable by design.
Guide teams in operational best practices, actively raising the bar for observability, reliability, and system resilience. Design, stress‑test, and refine systems for maintainability.
Improve the team's processes and response rhythms for handling high‑pressure situations, scope changes, or production incidents, fostering an environment of composure and continuous learning.
Develop, test, document, and deploy high quality software into production.
Develop a fundamental understanding of our industry, product, feature set and roadmap.
Work closely with our product team, design, and other internal stakeholders to make technology decisions that grow and improve our products.
Participate in an on‑call rotation to address urgent issues outside business hours and contribute to app enhancements and operational efficiency (OE) by troubleshooting and resolving application‑related problems.
Escalate when tasks or projects hit roadblocks.
Be open to occasional travel to Fanatics offices and other locations for conferences, events, meetings, and team‑building activities.

Required Qualifications

7+ years of experience designing and building highly scalable backend services.
Expertise with Kotlin as the primary development language, OR deep knowledge of Java with a strong willingness to transition to and develop primarily in Kotlin.
Proven experience with modern backend frameworks such as Spring Boot or similar.
Experience with Coroutines and Dependency Injection.
Team‑first mentality, with a willingness to do what it takes to get the job done and a desire to strive for better.
Able to effectively communicate complex technical subjects to a variety of audiences (engineers, technical leaders, marketing and operations teams, non‑technical functional leaders).
Familiar with Agile software product delivery and SCRUM methodology.
Thrives in a high‑growth environment where priorities evolve regularly and decisions are made quickly.
Able to effectively work cross‑functionally within an enterprise environment.
A Bachelor’s degree, or professional certification, or a combination of education and experience

Preferred Qualifications

Experience designing and building backend services using Spring Boot or similar Java frameworks
Experience working in large‑scale distributed systems and event‑driven architectures
Exposure to cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS, GCP), CI/CD pipelines, and observability tools
Familiarity with functional programming paradigms and actor‑based concurrency frameworks like Apache Pekko (or Akka).

We encourage you to apply even if you possess some but not all of these qualifications.

The expected salary range for this role is based on job‑related knowledge, skills, and experience. This role is eligible for the Fanatics Betting and Gaming annual bonus program and an equity award. Salary range is listed in USD; actual salary will vary based on location. Salary Range: $144,000 - $205,000 per year (actual salary will be determined in part by a successful candidate’s geographic location). In addition to base salary, bonus, and equity, full‑time employees are eligible for Medical, Dental, Vision, 401K, paid time off, and other benefits like GymPass, Pet Insurance, Family Care Benefits, and more.

Job Info