Senior Principal Engineer - Fanatics Markets

Role Overview

We're looking for a Senior Principal Software Engineer to serve as the technical North Star for our event-driven architecture: the person who sets the standard, makes the hard calls, and shapes how we scale for the next several years. This isn't a heads-down IC role. It's a seat at the table for every major technical decision we make — from how we handle sub-millisecond latency on Kafka/Redis at peak trading volume, to how the entire engineering org thinks about async messaging and distributed systems design.

Responsibilities

• Set the long-term architecture strategy for our event-driven platform — getting ahead of complexity rather than reacting to it, and eliminating risks before they become production problems.
• Drive strategically critical initiatives across multiple teams, establishing the patterns and trade-off frameworks that become the gold standard across the engineering org.
• Serve as the ultimate escalation point for the hardest distributed systems problems — the person teams call when they've hit a wall that no one else can break through.
• Mentor and elevate senior engineers, removing bottlenecks and raising the technical ceiling of everyone around you. The measure of success at this level is what the org can build because of you.
• Own the high-stakes trade-offs between immediate delivery and long-term architectural integrity, advising product and business leaders with clear, confident technical narratives.
• Define and enforce the "Fanatics Standard" for how we build, operate, and scale — from coding patterns and observability practices to incident response and platform resilience.
• Proactively audit and simplify the codebase, resolving architectural deficiencies and technical debt before they compound.