Staff Software Engineer, Operations

The role

You will lead the design and delivery of scalable operational systems for Customer Experience, Trust & Safety, Fraud Prevention, and Financial Operations. This role involves building microservices, event-driven workflows, and data pipelines on global platforms.

What you will do

• Partner with frontend engineers to define and expose clean, performant APIs and data contracts.
• Work with DevOps/SRE to design robust CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, monitoring, and alerting.
• Lead the design and implementation of microservices, event-driven workflows, and data pipelines.
• Ensure high availability, scalability, and security for core backend systems.
• Establish best practices for code quality, testing, performance tuning, and documentation.
• Conduct architecture reviews, mentor peers, and promote continuous improvement.
• Spearhead major initiatives across payments, inventory, search, and real-time notification services.
• Identify technical risks, propose solutions, and coordinate cross-team deliveries.
• Stay current on emerging backend technologies, cloud services, and industry trends.
• Lead brown-bag sessions, hackathons, or tech talks to share knowledge across teams.

Required qualifications

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field
• 8+ years building backend services in high-traffic, distributed environments
• Deep knowledge of at least one major backend language (e.g., Java, Go, Python, Node.js) and its ecosystem
• Solid understanding of microservices, REST/GraphQL, message queues (Kafka/RabbitMQ), and relational/NoSQL databases
• Experience in AWS/GCP
• Hands-on with containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation)
• Familiarity with CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, CircleCI) and monitoring/logging stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK)
• Proven ability to work seamlessly with frontend, design, QA, and DevOps teams
• Strong verbal and written communication
• Experience running design discussions and writing technical specs
• Track record of guiding and growing other engineers—pair programming, code reviews, career coaching
• Ability to influence technical direction and drive consensus in a fast-paced environment

About the company

Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform. Fanatics Collectibles is the home of sports cards, trading cards, and collectibles for over 100 million fans worldwide.