Senior Engineering Manager - Fanatics Markets

About the Team

Fanatics Markets is the real-money prediction and trading app where you can invest in moments you care about. Built on a secure platform, it lets users predict real-world outcomes and trade on events they actually follow - from sports and entertainment to political elections and beyond. Its mission is to redefine how fans engage with the moments and markets that matter most. We're looking for the right people to help us build the future of prediction markets.

We’re hiring for our Market Making team that sits outside the Fanatics Markets application’s operation, working independently with a third-party exchange and clearinghouse. The Market Maker provides liquidity across prediction markets — making every market feel deep, competitive, and tradeable — while managing its own P&L as an independent business line within the org. The Market Maker controls its data ingestion, pricing engine, order management, PnL and risk monitoring, and the internal Trading UI its traders rely on around the clock.

The market making team is small, moves fast, and deploys to production daily. We're expanding coverage across every major sport, market type, and event available to trade. World Cup 2026 is our next major milestone, and the NFL season follows close behind.

Role Overview

We're looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to build and lead the Market Making engineering team from the ground up. This is a founding leadership role — you'll own technical direction, team culture, and delivery for systems where real money is on the line with every price we quote. You'll partner directly with our trading team, manage a P&L you can see every morning, and build the operational foundation that lets us trade at scale and with confidence.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead the Market Making engineering team — recruiting, developing, and retaining engineers across the full pipeline from pricing and order management to PnL infrastructure and Trading UI.
• Set technical direction for the team's distributed, event-driven systems built on Java, Kafka, Redis, Postgres, and Kubernetes — ensuring architectural decisions hold up as we expand to new sports, market types, and exchange venues.
• Own the team's delivery and operational excellence: define engineering goals around availability, performance, and deployment cadence, and hold the team accountable to outcomes — not just output.
• Partner with our trading team and FMX product to align roadmap priorities, balancing near-term exchange coverage (World Cup, NFL) with longer-term platform investments like in-house pricing models and exchange abstraction.
• Build the operational foundation for live trading: on-call rotation, incident response runbooks, kill switch protocols, and escalation paths for P&L-impacting events.
• Develop genuine fluency in our trading economics — spreads, adverse selection, inventory risk, hold rate — and use that context to make better resourcing and prioritization decisions.
• Advocate for the team across the organization, driving clarity on P&L ownership, headcount, and cross-team dependencies with Trading, Product, Finance, and Legal.

Experience and Skills

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years managing engineering teams
• Proven success leading teams that build and operate distributed, event-driven systems at scale — with strong familiarity with Java/Kotlin, Kafka, Redis, Postgres, and Kubernetes.
• Track record of building engineering organizations that deliver business-critical systems with both reliability and speed — ideally in a startup or high-growth environment where the org was still taking shape.
• Strong ability to create clarity in ambiguous, complex environments — across technical architecture, team structure, and stakeholder alignment.
• Excellent communication and leadership skills, with the ability to influence both engineers and non-technical stakeholders including trading, finance, and executive leadership.
• Comfortable owning a real P&L: you can read a daily snapshot, understand what drove the outcome, and make engineering decisions informed by commercial context.

Preferred

• Background in real-time trading systems, financial infrastructure, or prediction markets — or strong adjacent experience in high-throughput, low-latency platforms where correctness has direct financial consequences.
• Familiarity with quantitative concepts: pricing models, spread logic, adverse selection, or inventory management
• Experience standing up on-call programs, SLAs, and operational frameworks for systems that can't afford downtime.

Depending on the role, your interview and onboarding experience may include in-person components, such as onsite interviews or Launching into Better: LIVE—a multi-day cultural immersion in New York City for full-time, non-seasonal hires. These sessions are designed to build connection and bring our culture to life, though specific travel and participation requirements will be confirmed based on your role and location. Your recruiter will provide clear guidance at each stage of the process.

For information about our benefits, please visit https://benefitsatfanatics.com/

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