Staff Software Engineer - Fanatics Markets

Role overview A Staff Software Engineer position on a Distributed Systems team powering a real-money prediction and trading platform. The work centers on the event-driven infrastructure behind live trading, where pricing decisions directly influence daily P&L. It is a hands-on, high-ownership role expected to translate deep trading-domain understanding into technical specs and durable systems.

Responsibilities - Design and scale distributed systems in Kotlin, Java, and Spring Boot to absorb the concurrency spikes typical of a live trading platform - Build and optimize high-throughput event pipelines on Kafka, owning partition strategy, consumer group design, and delivery guarantees - Engineer low-latency event-stream processing that preserves data integrity and cache coherence under peak load - Partner with product and engineering leaders to align cross-domain technical decisions while protecting architectural integrity - Diagnose and durably resolve production issues in a live trading environment, distinguishing pricing latency, strategy misfires, and adverse selection patterns - Raise engineering standards through design docs, code and architecture reviews, and reusable patterns

Requirements - 7+ years building scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems in production - Expert proficiency in Java or Kotlin with Spring Boot and modern API design across REST, gRPC, and Protobuf - Deep hands-on Kafka (or Redpanda/Pub Sub) experience covering internals, partition strategies, consumer group rebalancing, and delivery guarantees - Strong background in event-driven architecture and asynchronous messaging under real production load - Demonstrated end-to-end ownership of systems from design through operation and continuous improvement - Clear, direct communicator comfortable writing design docs, explaining production failures to traders, and debating trade-offs with senior engineers

Nice to have - Experience with real-time delivery systems such as WebSocket fan-out, server-sent events, or pub/sub at scale - Familiarity with financial platforms, real-time trading systems, or prediction markets - Background in a high-growth startup environment with broad technical ownership - Familiarity with FIX protocol or exchange connectivity patterns