Staff Software Engineer

Job Description Are you a hands-on engineering senior individual / thought leader with a passion for building cutting-edge, impactful solutions? We're seeking a Staff Engineer to lead the design and architecture of our next-generation e-commerce platform and services. You'll be the trusted technical advisor driving strategic initiatives that power seamless customer experiences, operational excellence, and business innovation. As a Staff Engineer, you'll lead discovery, design, and architecture for complex projects spanning multiple domains. You'll drive full project lifecycles independently, anticipate technical challenges, and communicate design trade-offs to engineers and senior stakeholders. Your expertise in distributed systems, modern architecture patterns, cloud technologies, and AI/ML integration will be critical in creating platforms that handle massive scale while delivering exceptional performance. You are recognized as a subject matter expert who deeply understands problems and customer needs, leaving no room for ambiguity. You champion engineering culture, continuous improvement, and technical excellence across the organization. You mentor engineers, influence architectural decisions, and recover gracefully from failures while triaging system-wide performance problems.

What Will You Do

• Lead discovery, design, and architecture for complex, multi-domain projects that shape our platform strategy
• Architect highly scalable, fault-tolerant, mission-critical systems on cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) handling millions of transactions
• Drive full project lifecycles independently, from technical vision through production delivery and operational excellence
• Design and implement next-generation microservices, APIs, and platform infrastructure ensuring scalability, reliability, and security
• Provide strategic technical direction and serve as trusted advisor to engineering teams and senior stakeholders
• Anticipate technical issues, design for failure recovery, and triage complex system-wide performance problems
• Write complete, actionable stories and break down complex initiatives into executable work streams
• Communicate design trade-offs clearly to both technical teams and senior leadership, influencing architectural decisions
• Establish best practices, design patterns, and architectural standards across the organization
• Champion engineering culture, continuous improvement, and technical excellence
• Mentor and develop engineers across multiple teams, raising the technical bar organization-wide
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams including Product, UX/UI, Analytics, and Business stakeholders to define platform requirements
• Drive initiatives to enhance platform scalability, stability, security, compliance, and governance
• Choose optimal technology stacks considering performance, scalability, cost, maintainability, and integration
• Develop observability, monitoring, and operational strategies for highly available systems
• Lead adoption of AI/ML capabilities to enhance system reliability, developer productivity, and customer experience
• Define and drive migration strategies, version management, and backward compatibility approaches

Job Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience; Master’s degree preferred.
• 10 years of experience in software development, and with data structures/algorithms.
• 5+ years of experience in Cloud Architecture and Big Data technologies such as Apache Spark, Flink, Amazon EMR, Kafka, Hive, Redshift, Snowflake.
• Expertise in SQL technologies and RDBMS (PostgreSQL, AWS RDS, MySQL).
• Must have experience in building Data Platforms – designing and building data models, integrating data from many sources, building ETL and data-flow pipelines, and supporting all parts of the data platform.
• Strong problem-solving abilities and a passion for tackling complex technical challenges.
• Must have experience in developing application with high performance and low latency
• Experience in Web Services, API integration, Data exchanges with third parties is preferred.
• Data Analysis skill – can make arguments with data and proper visualization.
• Energetic, enthusiastic, detail-oriented, and passionate about producing high-quality analytics deliverables.
• Proven expertise in hands-on engineering on cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including but not limited to: data ingestion, transformation, processing, storage, and serving. Demonstrated experience with cloud-native services for data engineering, such as data lakes, data warehouses, data pipelines, and serverless computing.

Education & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or equivalent practical experience
• 10+ years of experience in software development with deep expertise in data structures and algorithms
• 7+ years of experience building and architecting large-scale distributed systems and cloud-native applications

Technical Expertise Software Architecture:

• Expert-level knowledge of distributed systems, microservices architecture, event-driven architecture, domain-driven design, and cloud-native design patterns
• Proven expertise in architecting large-scale platforms and services

Programming Excellence

• Mastery of multiple programming languages and paradigms (Java, Python, Go, Node.js, etc.)
• Deep understanding of performance optimization, concurrency, and system design

Backend & API Design

• Proven expertise in designing RESTful/GraphQL APIs, service contracts, versioning strategies, and multi-consumer API architectures
• Experience with Web Services, API integration, and data exchanges with third parties

Database & Storage

• Deep expertise in SQL/NoSQL databases (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra)
• Experience with database sharding, partitioning, replication, and consistency models

Cloud Architecture

• Hands-on experience architecting on cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) including serverless, containers, orchestration, CDN, load balancing, and multi-region deployments

Scalability & Performance

• Strong architectural knowledge of high-performance, low-latency systems
• Experience with caching strategies, rate limiting, and traffic management

DevOps & SRE

• Expertise in CI/CD, infrastructure as code, deployment strategies (blue-green, canary, feature flags), rollback mechanisms, and disaster recovery

Observability & Reliability

• Experience designing for observability, SLAs/SLOs, monitoring, alerting, distributed tracing, and chaos engineering

Security & Compliance

• Understanding of security best practices, authentication/authorization patterns, data protection, and regulatory requirements

AI/ML & Modern Technologies

• Proficiency using AI-powered development tools (GitHub Copilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer, Tabnine, ChatGPT) for code generation, refactoring, and documentation
• Experience integrating AI/ML APIs and services (OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS SageMaker, Azure AI) into applications
• Understanding of prompt engineering and LLM integration patterns
• Familiarity with vector databases and semantic search (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector)
• Knowledge of AI-assisted testing, code review, and quality assurance tools
• Awareness of latest AI developments including multimodal models, AI agents, function calling patterns, and autonomous systems
• Understanding of fine-tuning, RAG vs fine-tuning trade-offs, and specialized model deployment

About Us Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform. We ignite the passions of global sports fans and maximize the presence and reach for our hundreds of sports partners globally by offering products and services across Fanatics Commerce, Fanatics Collectibles, and Fanatics Betting & Gaming, allowing sports fans to Buy, Collect, and Bet. Through the Fanatics platform, sports fans can buy licensed fan gear, jerseys, lifestyle and streetwear products, headwear, and hardgoods; collect physical and digital trading cards, sports memorabilia, and other digital assets; and bet as the company builds its Sportsbook and iGaming platform. Fanatics has an established database of over 100 million global sports fans; a global partner network with approximately 900 sports properties, including major national and international professional sports leagues, players associations, teams, colleges, college conferences and retail partners, 2,500 athletes and celebrities, and 200 exclusive athletes; and over 2,000 retail locations, including its Lids retail stores. Our more than 22,000 employees are committed to relentlessly enhancing the fan experience and delighting sports fans globally.