Senior Principal Software Engineer

Senior Principal Software Engineer

Role Overview

We're looking for a Senior Principal Software Engineer to serve as the technical and architectural lead for our platforms. This is the person who sets the engineering standard, makes the hardest technical calls, and shapes our technology ecosystem for years to come along with helping us venture into new regions and take on our highest profile technical challenges and products.
This is not a heads-down IC role. It's a seat at the table and an opportunity to help define the technical strategy as we build a new engineering organization and scale our platform in the region and internationally. You will help to influence major architectural and technology decisions, establish engineering standards and processes, and serve as a trusted technical advisor and partner to the CTO.
You'll operate across the organization, connecting architecture, engineering, product, infrastructure, security, and operations to ensure we're building a platform that is scalable, resilient, and designed for long-term growth. You'll help establish the technical vision, develop the engineering principles and practices that guide the organization, and raise the technical bar across the entire team.
The ideal candidate is someone who can leverage AI and agentic coding methodology. Move seamlessly between deep technical architecture and executive-level strategy. Someone who is comfortable making difficult tradeoffs, challenging conventional thinking, and providing clarity when the path forward isn't obvious.

Responsibilities

• Influence extends to all verticals within the domain and collaborates across verticals to drive key technology decisions and a cohesive strategy

• Be a technology leader within your domain and mentor leadership within each vertical

• Remove bottlenecks and make technical and design approach trade-off decisions: opportunity vs. cost

• Have a strong understanding of modern AI/ML architectures, LLMs, AI agents, embeddings, vector search, RAG, and model integration patterns, with the ability to translate these technologies into production-grade systems

• Have experience identifying opportunities to leverage AI to improve products, engineering productivity, automation, decision-making, and operational efficiency

• Lead design decisions around systems architecture and/or product solutions, driving best practices and improving the speed of delivery

• Proactively audit and simplify the codebase, resolving architectural deficiencies and technical debt before they compound into systemic risk

• Define and implement best practices in operational excellence and mitigation strategies organizationally

• Advise technology leaders, our Product team, and other internal stakeholders to make technology decisions that grow and improve our products

• Engage external commercial partners to build key relationships and identify opportunities

• Develop an expert-level understanding of our industry, product, feature set, and roadmap

• 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 organization

• Mentor and elevate senior engineers, removing bottlenecks and raising the technical ceiling of everyone around 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

• Represent Fanatics externally through conference talks, technical writing, and open-source contributions, bringing the outside world in and taking what we're building out to the broader engineering community

Qualifications

• 15+ years building highly scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems

• Deep hands-on expertise with Kotlin, Java, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes, AWS

• You have mastery of a broad range of design approaches and can deconstruct an architecture to be developed by different teams

• The ability to break down complex, ambiguous system problems into actionable strategies for multiple teams simultaneously

• Demonstrated experience mentoring other engineers

• Able to effectively communicate complex technical subjects to a variety of audiences (engineers, technical leaders, marketing and operations teams, non-technical functional leaders)

• Familiar with Agile software product delivery and SCRUM methodology

• Excellent analytical and problem solving skills

• You have an agile mindset; able to embrace new initiatives in a fast-paced environment

• Thrives in an entrepreneurial, hyper-growth environment where priorities evolve regularly and decisions are made quickly

• Team-first mentality, with a willingness to do what it takes to get the job done and a desire to strive for better

• Experience working in a start-up/scale up environment

• Demonstrate advanced AI skills and practices

• Experience in international expansion is a bonus

If you possess some of these qualifications but not all of them, we still encourage you to apply!