As a Senior Staff Engineer | Tech Lead at Fanatics, you are both a hands-on technical expert and a driving force behind the success of your team. You lead by influence—aligning engineers, product managers, designers, and backend partners to deliver exceptional customer-facing experiences with speed, quality, and purpose. You combine deep technical expertise with strong communication and relationship-building skills to guide the team through complex challenges, balance priorities, and maintain a high-performing, well-oiled product.
You will operate at both strategic and implementation levels—owning, designing and evolving robust Backend-For-Frontend (BFF) solutions that power personalisation and content delivery across our platforms. You are responsible for the scalability, performance, and long-term technical direction of the BFF layer that enables our mobile and web client experiences, while fostering collaboration across organizations to move the business forward. Your leadership sets the tone for excellence, reliability, and teamwork.
We own the iCasino experience across Fanatics platforms—including the Standalone Casino App, iCasino within our Fanatics Sportsbook & Casino App, and the Casino Desktop website. Each of these experiences is powered by Kotlin Multiplatform, and the BFF plays a critical role in delivering high-quality, consistent, and fast-paced innovation across all ecosystems. Our ambition is to build the top online casinos in the U.S.—fun, dynamic, personalised, entertainment-focused products built with cutting-edge mobile technology.
Responsibilities
- Lead the team in delivering high-impact customer-facing capabilities within the BFF, maintaining platform quality, guiding engineers through technical and execution decisions.
- Collaborate across engineering, product, design, and backend organizations to align goals, unblock dependencies, and ensure successful delivery.
- Drive the design, development, testing, and deployment of high quality, stable and scalable BFF services in Java and Kotlin that power Android, iOS, and web experiences.
- Balance short-term delivery needs with long-term architectural vision, ensuring maintainable, performant, and reusable service patterns.
- Lead feature delivery end-to-end, from ideation through launch and iteration, ensuring quality and velocity across platforms.
- Set and uphold engineering standards, development principles, and best practices for API design, service architecture, and BFF patterns.
- Champion collaboration and relationship-building within the team and across partner orgs, acting as a trusted technical liaison.
- Participate in sprint planning, architecture discussions, and design reviews, contributing technical insight and organizational leadership.
- Drive operational excellence—monitoring reliability, test coverage, and observability, and ensuring issues are resolved with ownership and urgency.
- Mentor engineers across multiple levels and platforms, modeling proactive communication, problem-solving, and accountability.
- Be open to occasional travel to Fanatics offices or events for planning, collaboration, and team-building activities.
Required Qualifications
- More than 10 years of experience building and maintaining production distributed systems.
- Deep expertise in Java and/or Kotlin and Spring Boot, with experience designing scalable APIs and service layers.
- Experience building or evolving Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) or client-facing service architectures.
- Experience partnering closely with mobile or web client teams to deliver performant, user-centric APIs.
- Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional efforts and drive execution across teams without direct authority.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills—able to translate technical strategy into clear, actionable team direction.
- Proven success in Agile/SCRUM environments, balancing delivery speed with quality.
- A hands-on builder with a team-first mindset and a passion for coaching and elevating others.
- A Bachelor’s degree, or professional certification, or a combination of education and experience
Preferred Qualifications
- Production experience with Kotlin in backend systems, or demonstrated interest in adopting Kotlin where appropriate.
- Experience in sports, gaming, fintech, or other regulated, high-velocity environments.
- Passion for developer experience, performance optimization, and platform tooling.
- Strong focus on clean API design, service maintainability, and scalable architecture patterns.
Not sure if you check every box?
If you’re excited about this role, Kotlin Multiplatform, and building best-in-class mobile experiences, we encourage you to apply—even if you don’t meet every single qualification. We value passion, curiosity, and a growth mindset, and we believe great engineers come from diverse backgrounds and paths.
Please note, you do need to be living in the UK for this position and we do NOT offer sponsorship.
About UsLaunched 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.
