[Hiring] Staff Data Engineer @Fanatics Betting & Gaming

Role Description

We’re looking for a Staff Data Engineer to join our Data Engineering team, which builds and governs the data foundation that powers the business. You’ll set technical direction for our stack (Python ingestion pipelines, Airflow orchestration, and Snowflake/Databricks) and make sure data moves reliably, securely, and cost-effectively from source to decision-ready output.

This is a senior individual-contributor role with broad scope and influence. You’ll own the architecture of our most critical data systems, define the standards the team builds against, and take on novel, ambiguous, high-stakes problems that don’t have a runbook. You’ll be accountable for outcomes, not just deliverables.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and design of ingestion pipelines, orchestration frameworks, and data delivery systems, producing design docs that DE2s, DE3s, and senior engineers can implement against.
• Define and evolve the team’s frameworks, conventions, and reference patterns for pipelines, Airflow DAGs, testing, monitoring, and catalog registration so new sources onboard quickly and consistently.
• Lead diagnosis of the novel data integrity, performance, and reliability problems that escalate past senior engineers, driving systemic fixes and turning recurring failures into runbooks, automation, or better design.
• Set and track reliability standards (SLOs, alerting, on-call health) and reduce operational toil.
• Lead data security and governance strategy, including PII masking, RBAC, data classification, and lineage, in partnership with Security, Legal, and Compliance.
• Design reverse ETL and data delivery integrations (e.g., Segment, LaunchDarkly, Kafka, S3) with clear SLAs, downstream-impact analysis, and failure-handling guarantees.
• Drive platform decisions on Snowflake, Databricks, and AWS, including cost optimization, capacity planning, and build-vs-buy evaluation.
• Lead spec and design review, anticipating downstream impact, race conditions, idempotency gaps, and failure modes before code is written, and review high-risk PRs with rigor.
• Partner with BI, Data Science, Product, and business leadership to turn ambiguous requirements into scalable solutions, prioritize competing demands, and shape the roadmap.
• Mentor engineers at every level, represent the team in cross-functional forums, pay down technical debt, and participate in hiring.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software or data engineering experience, including significant experience owning production data platforms at scale.
• A track record of designing and delivering large, cross-team data systems from ambiguous requirements through production operation.
• Expert-level Python and SQL, with deep experience in ETL/ELT patterns for complex, high-volume transformations.
• Deep expertise in Airflow / Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow, including DAG design at scale and operational best practices.
• Strong command of pipeline fundamentals: idempotency, backfills, schema evolution, late-arriving data, data quality frameworks, and failure recovery.
• Hands-on experience with several of Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, dbt, Tableau, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL, with the judgment to choose the right tool for the job.
• Experience building data security and governance capabilities (PII masking, RBAC, catalog/lineage) and reusable pipeline frameworks that other engineers extend.
• Strong testing, CI/CD, and code review practices, and the ability to set those standards for a team.
• Proven ability to mentor engineers, influence without authority, and build alignment across teams.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including design docs, tradeoff analysis, and incident write-ups.

Nice to Have

• Experience with reverse ETL, real-time or streaming data (e.g., Kafka), and observability tooling (e.g., Datadog).
• Experience with FinOps and cost governance on cloud data platforms.
• Background in gaming, betting, e-commerce, or another regulated industry, including audit, compliance, and responsible handling of PII.
• Experience leading platform migrations or major re-architectures.

Salary Range

$180,500 — $237,500 USD

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