Staff Engineer - Backend/Kotlin (REMOTE)

fanaticsinc; United States; Remote; USD 144,000 - 235,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work with occasional travel

Competitive salary

Full-time benefits

Job summary

Fanatics Inc. is seeking a Staff-level backend engineer to set technical direction for distributed services powering a large-scale sports ecosystem spanning ecommerce, collectibles, and betting. You will stay hands-on while guiding architecture and delivering features end-to-end.

You will lead incident response, mentor engineers, and partner with product and design to drive scalable improvements and maintain high-quality software in a primarily remote environment with occasional office visits.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building scalable backend distributed systems.
• Proficiency with Spring and Kotlin and/or Java.
• Experience with clean code, hexagonal or layered architectures, domain-driven design.
• Knowledge of logging, monitoring, tracing in distributed systems.
• Agile delivery with cross-functional collaboration in large enterprises.
• Strong communication with engineers and executives.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end technical execution of complex features, from architecture through deployment and refinement
• Define and enforce engineering principles, guidelines, and best practices across the team
• Drive development, testing, documentation, and deployment of scalable production software
• Partner with product, design, and stakeholders on high-impact technical decisions aligned with long-term scalability
• Lead incident response as part of the on-call rotation, ensuring rapid diagnosis and remediation
• Mentor engineers at all levels and conduct code reviews that raise the quality bar

Skills

Backend architecture

Spring

Kotlin/Java

Distributed systems

Observability

Agile

Communication

Tools

Kafka

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

SQS

Job description

Role overview

Join a platform team that builds the shared foundations powering a large-scale sports ecosystem spanning ecommerce, collectibles, and betting. As a Staff-level backend engineer, you will set technical direction for distributed services while remaining hands-on, partnering with product and design to ship features end-to-end.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end technical execution of complex features, from architecture through deployment and refinement
• Define and enforce engineering principles, guidelines, and best practices across the team
• Drive development, testing, documentation, and deployment of scalable production software
• Partner with product, design, and stakeholders on high-impact technical decisions aligned with long-term scalability
• Lead incident response as part of the on-call rotation, ensuring rapid diagnosis and remediation
• Mentor engineers at all levels and conduct code reviews that raise the quality bar

Requirements

• 7+ years building highly scalable, performant, evolvable backend distributed systems
• Proficiency with Spring plus Kotlin and/or Java
• Track record of driving backend best practices and mentoring others in clean code, hexagonal/layered architectures, domain-driven design, and similar patterns
• Knowledge of observability practices including logging, monitoring, and tracing in distributed systems
• Expertise in Agile delivery with cross-functional collaboration in large enterprise environments
• Strong communication skills with engineers, executives, and non-technical audiences

Nice to have

• Background in sports, gaming, or content delivery
• Go experience alongside Kotlin or Java
• Familiarity with messaging technologies such as Kafka or Amazon SQS and event-driven architectures
• Comfort with cloud-native tooling and infrastructure-as-code such as Kubernetes, Helm, and Terraform
• Experience working across both legacy and greenfield codebases

Benefits and work setup

• Remote role with occasional travel to offices and events for conferences, meetings, and team-building
• Base salary range of $144,000–$235,000 USD, plus bonus, with full-time benefits
• Open to candidates who meet some but not all qualifications