[Hiring] Staff Engineer @Fanatics Inc.

Role Description

As a Staff Engineer on the Payments team, you will be the technical owner of the systems that move money into, out of, and across Fanatics: deposits, withdrawals, and payments at checkout. The platform you will own serves Sportsbook and Casino today and is being extended to other Fanatics businesses.

• Let a customer's shared balance appear as a payment option alongside cards and bank transfers.
• Shape how Fanatics connects to processors, acquirers, and banking partners.
• Aim to improve approval rates, lower cost per transaction, and reduce the number of times the same funds are moved.

This role combines deep backend expertise with architectural leadership. You will set the technical direction for payments across several teams and work closely with Fraud, Responsible Gaming, Finance, Legal, and Compliance partners to build payment flows that are reliable, cost-effective, and compliant with state regulations and card scheme rules.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of the payments platform, including provider integrations, deposit and withdrawal flows, and the services other Fanatics businesses call to take payment.
• Design and build distributed services in Java and Spring Boot that process high transaction volume with strict requirements for correctness, security, and uptime.
• Build payment orchestration and routing across processors, acquirers, and payment methods.
• Handle failure in third-party integrations by design, including timeouts, retries, idempotency, duplicate callbacks, partial failures, and reconciliation against provider and bank settlement files.
• Lead the technical work of onboarding new providers and banking partners.
• Build in regulatory and card scheme requirements in partnership with Legal, Compliance, and Finance.
• Work with Fraud and Risk to bring risk signals into the payment path and handle chargebacks and disputes.
• Reduce payment cost through routing, provider terms, and design choices that avoid unnecessary movement of money.
• Set standards for security, data handling, and limiting PCI scope across payment services.
• Lead architectural reviews, design sessions, and incident postmortems, and mentor engineers across the team.
• Partner with product, frontend, and mobile teams for consistent and clear payment experiences.
• Be open to occasional travel to Fanatics offices or industry events for planning, collaboration, and team development.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep expertise in Java and Spring Boot.
• Experience building and operating payment systems in production.
• Strong understanding of idempotency, reconciliation, and failure handling in systems that depend on third-party providers.
• Experience designing secure, high-scale, low-latency distributed systems.
• Experience with event-driven architectures and message streaming platforms such as Kafka.
• Working knowledge of security and compliance requirements for handling payment data, including PCI DSS.
• Demonstrated success setting technical direction and driving alignment across multiple teams.
• Ability to explain complex technical tradeoffs clearly to engineering, product, finance, and leadership audiences.
• Comfort working in a fast-paced, regulated environment with changing priorities.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in online gaming, sports betting, fintech, or banking.
• Knowledge of how card networks, acquirers, and issuers work.
• Experience with payment orchestration, smart routing, or building a payments platform that serves several business units.
• Experience integrating with banking partners or building account funding and money movement products.
• Experience with financial reconciliation and settlement reporting.
• Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and observability tooling such as Datadog, Grafana, or CloudWatch.
• Interest in developer experience, clean API design, and maintainable systems.

Salary Range

$190,000 — $237,500 USD

For information about our benefits, please visit https://benefitsatfanatics.com/