About this role
About Us
FanaticsCollect.com is on a mission to build the ultimate digital collectibles platform for sports and entertainment fans worldwide. As we embark on our next-generation backend rewrite, we’re looking for a seasoned Staff Backend Engineer to join our cross-functional team. You’ll work hand-in-hand with frontend and DevOps engineers to design, develop, and deploy scalable services that power new marketplace features, real-time experiences, and data-driven insights.
What You’ll Do
- Collaborate Closely
- 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.
- Architect & Build
- Lead the design and implementation of microservices, event-driven workflows, and data pipelines.
- Ensure high availability, scalability, and security for core backend systems.
- Drive Technical Excellence
- Establish best practices for code quality, testing, performance tuning, and documentation.
- Conduct architecture reviews, mentor peers, and promote continuous improvement.
- Own Key Projects
- 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.
- Foster Learning & Innovation
- Stay current on emerging backend technologies, cloud services, and industry trends.
- Lead brown-bag sessions, hackathons, or tech talks to share knowledge across teams.
What We’re Looking For
- Experience & Expertise
- 5+ 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.
- DevOps Mindset
- 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).
- Collaboration & Communication
- 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.
- Leadership & Mentorship
- 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 environment.
The salary range for this position is $172,000 - $258,000, which represents base pay only and does not include short-term or long-term incentive compensation. When determining base pay, as part of a final compensation package, we consider several factors such as location, experience, qualifications, and training.
Ensure your Fanatics job offer is legitimate and don’t fall victim to fraud. Fanatics never seeks payment from job applicants. Feel free to ask your recruiter for a phone call or other type of communication for interview, and ensure your communication is coming from a Fanatics email address (including @collectfanatics.com). For added security, where possible, apply through our company website at www.fanaticsinc.com/careers
Other facts
About Fanatics
The Topps Company, Inc. is the iconic, preeminent leader in physical and digital collectibles. Acquired by Fanatics Collectibles in January 2022, Topps is the company's cornerstone licensed trading card brand.
Founded in 1938, The Topps Company started in confections with "Topps Gum" (later introducing Bazooka Bubble Gum) and released its first trading card set in 1950. Today, the company produces trading cards and collectibles, custom cards, memorabilia, sticker album collections and more related to iconic and pop culture brands such as Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, Star Wars, Bundesliga, UEFA Champions League, World Wrestling Entertainment and Garbage Pail Kids. Fanatics Collectibles has also secured long-term, exclusive rights to design, manufacture and distribute trading cards for several additional sports properties, including NBA, NBPA and NFLPA, in the coming years.
Topps’ Digital Apps division produces, develops and operates mobile applications that give you access to an exclusive digital card collection at your fingertips that are sold via the Apple and Google app stores under the brand names BUNT, KICK, NHL SKATE, Star Wars Card Trader, The Walking Dead Universe Collect, WWE SLAM, Marvel Collect! and Disney Collect! https://play.toppsapps.com/.
Headquartered in New York City, Topps maintains offices in several countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, India and Brazil.
What you'll do
- The Staff Backend Engineer will collaborate with frontend and DevOps engineers to design and implement scalable backend services. They will lead major initiatives across various features and ensure high availability and security for core systems.
Ready to join Fanatics?
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