Strategic Principal Engineer, Platform Architecture

Fanatics Collectibles; United States; Remote; USD 240,000 - 299,000; Full time

Job summary

Fanatics is seeking a Principal Engineer in our Strategic Engineering Group to set the technical North Star for a rapidly scaling platform. You will define architecture, lead multi-team initiatives, and shape decisions on latency, distributed systems, and platform reliability.

This is not a solo IC role; you will collaborate with Product, Security, Infrastructure IT, and other platform teams to build, enhance, and support our core services, sometimes guiding cross-vertical programs over

Qualifications

• 15+ years of software engineering experience with 10+ years in Senior Staff or above.
• Experience leading programs spanning multiple teams over multi-quarter timelines.
• Proven ability to identify business-critical problems and justify investments.
• History setting technical patterns adopted by other teams.
• Experience mentoring Staff/Senior Staff engineers.
• Strong incident response and systemic hardening experience.
• Excellent communication across engineering and executives.

Responsibilities

• Set long-term architecture strategy for event-driven platform.
• Drive cross-vertical initiatives with standard patterns.
• Serve as escalation point for complex distributed systems.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise technical ceiling.
• Partner with product and business to define tech strategy.
• Set standards for testing, observability, incident response, resilience.
• Represent organization via writing, talks, and open-source contributions.

Skills

Software engineering

Senior staff leadership

Mentoring

Communication skills

Program leadership

Job description

Fanatics is seeking a Principal Engineer in our Strategic Engineering Group to set the technical North Star for a rapidly scaling platform. You will define architecture, lead multi-team initiatives, and shape decisions on latency, distributed systems, and platform reliability.

This is not a solo IC role; you will collaborate with Product, Security, Infrastructure IT, and other platform teams to build, enhance, and support our core services, sometimes guiding cross-vertical programs over