Staff Software Engineer, Operations

About the Team

Fanatics Collectibles is the home of sports cards, trading cards, and collectibles for over 100 million fans worldwide. As part of the global Fanatics platform, we're rebuilding how collectors discover, buy, sell, and experience their hobby with world class technology and product experiences.

As part of Fanatics Collectibles’ continued global growth, we are establishing a new technology hub in Mexico City focused on operational excellence, platform scalability, trust, and customer experience. This team partners closely with Customer Experience (CX), Trust & Safety, Fraud Prevention, Payments, and Financial Operations organizations to build scalable systems and operational tooling that support millions of users and transactions globally.

Role Summary

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will lead the design and delivery of scalable operational systems that support Customer Experience, Trust & Safety, Fraud Prevention, and Financial Operations across Fanatics Collectibles’ global platforms.

Key Responsibilities

• Partner with frontend engineers to define and expose clean, performant APIs and data contracts.
• Work with DevOps/SRE to design robust CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, monitoring, and alerting.
• Lead the design and implementation of microservices, event-driven workflows, and data pipelines.
• Ensure high availability, scalability, and security for core backend systems.
• Establish best practices for code quality, testing, performance tuning, and documentation.
• Conduct architecture reviews, mentor peers, and promote continuous improvement.
• Spearhead major initiatives—from feature conception through production rollout—across payments, inventory, search, and real-time notification services.
• Identify technical risks, propose solutions, and coordinate cross-team deliveries.
• Stay current on emerging backend technologies, cloud services, and industry trends.
• Lead brown-bag sessions, hackathons, or tech talks to share knowledge across teams.

Basic Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field required.
• 8+ years building backend services in high-traffic, distributed environments.
• Deep knowledge of at least one major backend language (e.g., Java, Go, Python, Node.js) and its ecosystem.
• Solid understanding of microservices, REST/GraphQL, message queues (Kafka/RabbitMQ), and relational/NoSQL databases.
• Experience in AWS/GCP.
• Hands-on with containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation).
• Familiarity with CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, CircleCI) and monitoring/logging stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).
• Proven ability to work seamlessly with frontend, design, QA, and DevOps teams.
• Strong verbal and written communication; experience running design discussions and writing technical specs.
• Track record of guiding and growing other engineers—pair programming, code reviews, career coaching.
• Ability to influence technical direction and drive consensus in a fast-paced environmen.