Responsibilities
- Lead the design and development of consumer-facing backend services powering mobile Sportsbook and Casino experiences
- Architect and own backend-for-frontend (BFF) services that aggregate, transform, and optimize data for mobile clients
- Drive API design and service contracts in partnership with mobile engineers and product managers
- Translate complex product requirements into scalable, maintainable technical solutions
- Lead implementation of major backend initiatives from design through production readiness, including testing, observability, and operational planning
- Make and guide architectural decisions around data flow, service boundaries, resiliency, and performance optimization
- Improve system reliability, scalability, and latency for real-time betting and gameplay systems
- Participate in and help evolve the team’s on-call practices; lead root cause analysis and long-term reliability improvements
- Establish and promote best practices for observability, logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting
- Provide technical mentorship to other engineers through code reviews, design reviews, and knowledge sharing
- Contribute to technical roadmaps, quarterly planning, and cross-team architecture discussions
- Continuously deepen understanding of the business domain, including sports event hierarchies, betting workflows, and data quality considerations
- Foster a high-performing, inclusive engineering culture
- Be open to occasional travel to Fanatics offices or industry events for collaboration and team-building
Requirements
- 7+ years of professional software development experience, primarily focused on backend or service-oriented systems
- Strong programming expertise with significant hands-on experience in Kotlin OR Java
- Proven experience designing, building, and operating scalable backend services and RESTful APIs (ideally using Spring Boot, Spring Web, or similar frameworks)
- Deep understanding of microservices architecture, distributed systems patterns, and API design principles
- Experience leading technical design discussions and making architectural tradeoffs
- Strong experience with databases (SQL and/or NoSQL), data modeling, caching strategies, and performance tuning
- Demonstrated ownership of services from design through long-term production support
- Experience improving system reliability, scalability, and operational maturity in production environments
- Strong familiarity with monitoring, alerting, CI/CD pipelines, and incident response processes
- Ability to drive complex technical initiatives with minimal oversight
- Strong problem-solving skills and ability to reason through ambiguous, high-impact challenges
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence cross-functional stakeholders in a remote-first environment
Nice to Have
- Experience designing and operating large-scale distributed or event-driven systems
- Strong familiarity with Apache Kafka or similar messaging/streaming platforms
- Experience with Pekko (or Akka), reactive programming models, or asynchronous processing
- Experience building and scaling backend-for-frontend (BFF) architectures for mobile applications
- Experience in building backend services in Kotlin
- Knowledge of cloud platforms such as GCP or AWS and containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes)
- Experience optimizing systems for low latency, high throughput, and real-time data delivery
- Background working with data-intensive services, live feeds, or real-time processing pipelines
- Experience mentoring engineers and contributing to technical hiring processes
- Interest in sports, gaming, or highly interactive consumer products
Work Arrangement
Hybrid
Team
Structure: Fanatics Betting and Gaming
Additional Information
- Depending on the role, your interview and onboarding experience may include in-person components, such as onsite interviews or Launching into Better: LIVE—a multi-day cultural immersion in New York City for full-time, non-seasonal hires. These sessions are designed to build connection and bring our culture to life, though specific travel and participation requirements will be confirmed based on your role and location. Your recruiter will provide clear guidance at each stage of the process.
