Senior Software Engineer – Client Service

Fanatics•New York, NY

About The Position

As a Senior Software Engineer at Fanatics Betting & Gaming (FBG), you will play a senior technical role in building and evolving the client-facing service layers that power our Sportsbook and Casino experiences. These services sit between live sports data, internal platforms, and consumer applications, enabling fast, reliable, and personalized experiences for millions of fans. In this role, you are a highly experienced individual contributor who leads the design and evolution of backend services and APIs from concept through production and long-term operation. You will drive architectural decisions, shape technical direction within the team, and collaborate cross-functionally with mobile engineers, product managers, and platform teams to deliver scalable backend-for-frontend (BFF) services supporting real-time user acquisition and retention experiences. You bring deep expertise in service-oriented and distributed systems and are comfortable leading complex initiatives in ambiguous, high-impact problem spaces. You proactively identify system risks, drive performance and reliability improvements, and raise the bar for engineering quality. We value engineers who demonstrate strong technical leadership, ownership, and a commitment to operational excellence in real-time, high-traffic environments.

Requirements

7+ years of professional software development experience, primarily focused on backend or service-oriented systems
Strong programming expertise with significant hands-on experience in Kotlin or Java
Proven experience designing, building, and operating scalable backend services and RESTful APIs (ideally using Spring Boot, Spring Web, or similar frameworks)
Deep understanding of microservices architecture, distributed systems patterns, and API design principles
Experience leading technical design discussions and making architectural tradeoffs
Strong experience with databases (SQL and/or NoSQL), data modeling, caching strategies, and performance tuning
Demonstrated ownership of services from design through long-term production support
Experience improving system reliability, scalability, and operational maturity in production environments
Strong familiarity with monitoring, alerting, CI/CD pipelines, and incident response processes
Ability to drive complex technical initiatives with minimal oversight
Strong problem-solving skills and ability to reason through ambiguous, high-impact challenges
Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence cross-functional stakeholders in a remote-first environment

Nice To Haves

Experience designing and operating large-scale distributed or event-driven systems
Strong familiarity with Apache Kafka or similar messaging/streaming platforms
Experience with Pekko (or Akka), reactive programming models, or asynchronous processing
Experience building and scaling backend-for-frontend (BFF) architectures for mobile applications
Experience in building backend services in Kotlin
Knowledge of cloud platforms such as GCP or AWS and containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes)
Experience optimizing systems for low latency, high throughput, and real-time data delivery
Background working with data-intensive services, live feeds, or real-time processing pipelines
Experience mentoring engineers and contributing to technical hiring processes
Interest in sports, gaming, or highly interactive consumer products

Responsibilities

Lead the design and development of consumer-facing backend services powering mobile Sportsbook and Casino experiences
Architect and own backend-for-frontend (BFF) services that aggregate, transform, and optimize data for mobile clients
Drive API design and service contracts in partnership with mobile engineers and product managers
Translate complex product requirements into scalable, maintainable technical solutions
Lead implementation of major backend initiatives from design through production readiness, including testing, observability, and operational planning
Make and guide architectural decisions around data flow, service boundaries, resiliency, and performance optimization
Improve system reliability, scalability, and latency for real-time betting and gameplay systems
Participate in and help evolve the team’s on-call practices; lead root cause analysis and long-term reliability improvements
Establish and promote best practices for observability, logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting
Provide technical mentorship to other engineers through code reviews, design reviews, and knowledge sharing
Contribute to technical roadmaps, quarterly planning, and cross-team architecture discussions
Continuously deepen understanding of the business domain, including sports event hierarchies, betting workflows, and data quality considerations
Foster a high-performing, inclusive engineering culture
Be open to occasional travel to Fanatics offices or industry events for collaboration and team-building