Software Engineer II Distributed Systems

Overview

Fanatics Betting & Gaming (FBG) is on a mission to create the best online sportsbook in the industry, and we’re looking for an experienced Software Engineer II, Back End to help us get there.

As a Software Engineer II on our Online Sportsbook team, you will play a key role in designing, developing, and optimizing the backend systems that power our sportsbook platform. You’ll work on critical services that drive the entire betting ecosystem—handling trading data, enabling seamless bet placement and settlement, and building internal tooling to support real-time trading operations. Launched in 2021, Fanatics Betting and Gaming is the online and retail sports betting subsidiary of Fanatics Holdings Inc., a global digital sports platform. The Fanatics Sportsbook is available to nearly 93% of the addressable online sports bettor market in the U.S.

At FBG, we’re revolutionizing sports betting with cutting-edge technology, a customer-first mindset, and a world-class engineering team. You’ll have the opportunity to work on complex, high-scale challenges in an exciting and rapidly growing industry—all while being part of a team that values innovation, collaboration, and excellence.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test, and deploy scalable backend services and REST/gRPC APIs powering search, live odds, box scores, and event tracking.
• Implement production-grade patterns: idempotent handlers, retries with jitter, backpressure, schema evolution, and safe migrations.
• Collaborate with senior engineers to understand data pipelines, dependencies, SLAs/SLOs, and product requirements; break work into measurable increments.
• Participate in on-call rotation; triage, debug, and resolve production issues using tracing, logs, and metrics; write post-incident follow-ups.
• Contribute to architecture discussions, sprint planning, and design docs; propose pragmatic improvements that raise the team’s delivery speed and safety.
• Build observability into everything (RED/USE metrics, tracing, actionable alerts) and instrument latency/error/throughput KPIs.
• Develop domain fluency (sports event hierarchies, feeds, data quality) and how correctness/latency impact user trust and conversion.
• Stay current with backend trends in distributed systems, cloud-native infra, and data APIs.
• Occasional travel to FBG offices or industry events for collaboration and team-building.

Required Qualifications

• 2–5 years building backend systems or APIs in high-throughput or data-rich environments.
• 2+ years with Spring Boot; familiarity with reactive/non-blocking patterns is a plus.
• Experience with event-driven systems (Kafka or similar) and at least one database (PostgreSQL or MongoDB) plus caching (Redis).
• Solid grasp of microservices design and API fundamentals (REST/gRPC, pagination, auth, rate limiting, idempotency).
• Comfort with observability practices (logs/metrics/traces), CI/CD, automated testing (unit/integration/contract), and Agile workflows.
• Hands-on use of AI coding tools (Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, etc.) to accelerate delivery—able to explain when they helped, when they hurt, and how you verified outputs.
• Clear written and verbal communication in a remote-first environment; collaborative, ownership-oriented mindset.

Preferred Qualifications

• Cloud experience (GCP/AWS) and/or Kubernetes; infrastructure as code familiarity.
• Tooling/data stack exposure: Snowflake, Databricks, protobuf/Avro + Schema Registry, OpenTelemetry, k6/Vegeta for load testing.
• Java experience; protobuf/gRPC familiarity; knowledge of schema migration strategies and blue/green or canary deploys.
• Background in startup-like environments or 0→1 initiatives; comfort iterating quickly with guardrails.
• Interest in sports/gaming, fintech, Generative AI, recommendation systems, or personalization at scale.

The expected salary range for this role is based on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. This role is eligible for the Fanatics Betting and Gaming annual bonus program and an equity award. *Salary range is listed in USD; actual salary will vary based on location. *Salary Range: $108,000 - $186,000 per year (actual salary will be determined in part by a successful candidate’s geographic location). In addition to base salary, bonus, and equity, full-time employees are eligible for Medical, Dental, Vision, 401K, paid time off, and other benefits like GymPass, Pet Insurance, Family Care Benefits, and more. We’ll also give you $700 to set up your home office! Please note that visa sponsorship is not available for this position.

Launched in 2021, Fanatics Betting and Gaming is the online and retail sports betting subsidiary of Fanatics, a global digital sports platform. The Fanatics Sportsbook is available to 95% of the addressable online sports bettor market in the U.S. Fanatics Casino is currently available online in Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Fanatics Betting and Gaming operates twenty-two retail sports betting locations, including the only sportsbook inside an NFL stadium at Northwest Stadium. Fanatics Betting and Gaming is headquartered in New York with offices in Denver, Leeds and Dublin.