Staff Engineer Core

Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform. We ignite the passions of global sports fans and maximize the presence and reach for our hundreds of sports partners globally by offering products and services across Fanatics Commerce, Fanatics Collectibles, and Fanatics Betting & Gaming, allowing sports fans to Buy, Collect, and Bet. Through the Fanatics platform, sports fans can buy licensed fan gear, jerseys, lifestyle and streetwear products, headwear, and hardgoods;

collect physical and digital trading cards, sports memorabilia, and other digital assets; and bet as the company builds its Sports book and iGaming platform. Fanatics has an established database of over 100 million global sports fans; a global partner network with approximately 900 sports properties, including major national and international professional sports leagues, players associations, teams, colleges, college conferences and retail partners, 2,500 athletes and celebrities, and 200 exclusive athletes;

and over 2,000 retail locations, including its Lids retail stores. Our more than 22,000 employees are committed to relentlessly enhancing the fan experience and delighting sports fans globally.

Fanatics Betting & Gaming (FBG) is the online and retail sports betting subsidiary of Fanatics Holdings, Inc. As a Staff Engineer on the Payments team, you will be the technical owner of the systems that move money into, out of, and across Fanatics: deposits, withdrawals, and payments at checkout.

The platform you will own serves Sports book and Casino today and is being extended to other Fanatics businesses. A key part of that work is letting a customer's shared balance appear as a payment option alongside cards and bank transfers wherever they shop, so that money already held at Fanatics does not have to leave and come back. You will also shape how Fanatics connects to processors, acquirers, and banking partners, with the aim of improving approval rates, lowering cost per transaction, and reducing the number of times the same funds are moved.

This role combines deep backend expertise with architectural leadership. You will set the technical direction for payments across several teams and work closely with Fraud, Responsible Gaming, Finance, Legal, and Compliance partners to build payment flows that are reliable, cost-effective, and compliant with state regulations and card scheme rules.

• Own the architecture of the payments platform, including provider integrations, deposit and withdrawal flows, and the services other Fanatics businesses call to take payment.
• Design and build distributed services in Java and Spring Boot that process high transaction volume with strict requirements for correctness, security, and uptime.
• Build payment orchestration and routing across processors, acquirers, and payment methods, using approval rate, cost, and provider health to decide where each transaction goes, with failover when a provider degrades.
• Handle failure in third‑party integrations by design, including timeouts, retries, idempotency, duplicate callbacks, partial failures, and reconciliation against provider and bank settlement files.
• Lead the technical work of onboarding new providers and banking partners, including evaluating options and defining the integration, testing, and rollout approach.
• Build in regulatory and card scheme requirements, such as per‑jurisdiction rules and how transactions are classified, in partnership with Legal, Compliance, and Finance.
• Work with Fraud and Risk to bring risk signals into the payment path and to handle chargebacks and disputes, including how they are attributed when funds are used across businesses.
• Reduce payment cost through routing, provider terms, and design choices that avoid unnecessary movement of money.
• Set standards for security, data handling, and limiting PCI scope across payment services.
• Lead architectural reviews, design sessions, and incident postmortems, and mentor engineers across the team.
• Partner with product, frontend, and mobile teams so that payment experiences are consistent and clear for customers.
• Be open to occasional travel to Fanatics offices or industry events for planning, collaboration, and team development.

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep expertise in Java and Spring Boot.
• Experience building and operating payment systems in production, such as deposit and withdrawal flows, payment gateway or processor…