Staff Platform Engineer, Data Storage - Core
About the role
Platform Storage
Platform Storage builds and operates the data infrastructure that powers Fanatics Betting & Gaming: PostgreSQL/RDS, MongoDB, Kafka (MSK), DynamoDB, and Elasticache/Valkey. The team owns database and streaming reliability for dozens of product engineering teams — acting as both platform builders and embedded technical partners, with a focus on self-service tooling, GitOps-managed infrastructure, and hands-on ownership of production data systems.
About the Role
Fanatics Betting & Gaming (FBG) is seeking a Staff Platform Storage Engineer to join our Platform Storage team, based in the United States. This role owns a critical slice of our data infrastructure — including a portfolio of production PostgreSQL databases and our Kafka/MSK streaming platform — and acts as the embedded platform liaison for the product teams built on top of them.
As a Staff Engineer, you will operate with a high degree of autonomy, leading complex database and streaming infrastructure initiatives, setting standards for reliability and performance, and acting as the go-to technical resource for schema design, query performance, and incident response across the teams you support.
Responsibilities
- Own database liaison responsibility for a portfolio of production PostgreSQL/RDS instances — query review, schema change approval, performance tuning, and incident triage for the teams built on top of them.
- Operate and evolve our Kafka/MSK streaming platform: topic lifecycle management via GitOps, cluster health across environments, and CDC (Debezium) pipeline reliability.
- Build and maintain self-service tooling that lets product teams provision database and streaming resources without a manual ticket queue.
- Drive platform stability projects — operator/version upgrades, root-cause fixes for recurring operational issues, and proactive capacity/cost optimization across the database and streaming fleet.
- Act as the technical escalation point for cross-team incidents where the root cause traces back to shared data infrastructure (replication lag, connection exhaustion, CPU/throughput issues).
- Represent Platform Storage in cross-org infrastructure initiatives and standardization efforts.
- Mentor engineers and participate in on-call rotations.
What You Bring
- 8+ years of exper