Staff Engineer, Platform Storage

About Us Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform. We ignite the passions of global sports fans and maximize the presence and reach for our hundreds of sports partners globally by offering products and services across Fanatics Commerce, Fanatics Collectibles, and Fanatics Betting & Gaming, allowing sports fans to Buy, Collect, and Bet. Through the Fanatics platform, sports fans can buy licensed fan gear, jerseys, lifestyle and streetwear products, headwear, and hardgoods; collect physical and digital trading cards, sports memorabilia, and other digital assets; and bet as the company builds its Sportsbook and iGaming platform. Fanatics has an established database of over 100 million global sports fans; a global partner network with approximately 900 sports properties, including major national and international professional sports leagues, players associations, teams, colleges, college conferences and retail partners, 2,500 athletes and celebrities, and 200 exclusive athletes; and over 2,000 retail locations, including its Lids retail stores. Our more than 22,000 employees are committed to relentlessly enhancing the fan experience and delighting sports fans globally. Storage & Messaging Strategy: Lead the long-term architectural roadmap for enterprise-grade messaging and caching platforms. Define the strategy for data persistence, replication, and global distribution to support business-critical applications; Distributed Systems Architecture: Architect high-scale, multi-tenant middleware solutions focusing on Kafka and Redis. Oversee the design of clusters that handle massive throughput while maintaining strict reliability and low-latency requirements; Self-Service Middleware Infrastructure: Design and govern the "Infrastructure as Code" (IaC) and self-service tooling that allows developers to provision and manage messaging and caching resources autonomously without compromising security or performance standards; Performance & Capacity Governance: Establish organizational standards for performance tuning, capacity planning, and resource optimization of storage and messaging layers to ensure cost-effectiveness and system stability; Strategic Developer Enablement: Act as the primary authority for application teams on the integration of distributed middleware. Develop enterprise-wide patterns and libraries for producing/consuming messages and managing cache lifecycles; Advanced Observability & Reliability: Lead the design of comprehensive monitoring and alerting frameworks specifically for middleware health. Implement automated remediation strategies to minimize downtime and reduce Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) for storage-related incidents; Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with senior engineering leadership and product stakeholders to ensure the platform storage roadmap aligns with broader company growth and technical debt reduction goals; Technical Stewardship & Mentorship: Provide high-level technical oversight for the platform team. Act as a role model and mentor to senior engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence through rigorous design reviews and RFC contributions; Technology Innovation: Evaluate emerging trends in distributed storage, streaming, and in-memory data structures. Direct the adoption of new technologies that enhance the scalability and performance of the company's middleware stack. Up to 10% domestic travel may be required for meetings. Partial telecommuting permitted; on-site at 61 9th Avenue, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10011 when not telecommuting. Salary: $212,100 - $232,100 per year. MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS: Bachelor’s Degree or U.S. equivalent in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field, plus 5 years of professional experience as a Software Engineer, Platform Engineer, or any occupation, job title, or position performing observability tooling, developer requirements gathering, chaos testing, and incident management. Must also have…