Senior Staff Engineer - Market Maker

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 Staff Engineer to be the technical anchor of the Market Making platform — the person who goes deepest on the hardest problems, sets the bar for how we build, and ensures our architecture can scale as we expand to new sports, market types, and exchange venues. This is a high-ownership IC role at the intersection of distributed systems and quantitative finance, where the output of your work shows up directly in daily P&L.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and technical integrity of the market making platform — pricing engine, order management, data pipelines, PnL infrastructure — ensuring every critical component is reliable, performant, and extensible.
• Drive the hardest cross-domain technical initiatives end-to-end: from design through production, including the exchange abstraction layer being built for our in-house exchange and the pricing infrastructure needed to move beyond OddsFactory toward independent models.
• Be the engineer others turn to when they hit a hard wall — on distributed systems, Kafka/Redis pipeline design, JVM performance, or real-time trading system behavior under pressure.
• Set and maintain engineering standards for the team — authoring technical RFCs, leading design reviews, and establishing patterns that hold up as the platform scales to new venues and market types.
• Participate in production triage and post-incident reviews; when a bad P&L day traces back to pricing latency, an adverse selection pattern, or a pipeline failure — you lead the diagnosis and drive the durable fix.
• Mentor and develop senior and staff engineers on the team, raising the technical ceiling on distributed systems thinking, quantitative finance concepts, and production system ownership.

Experience and Skills

• 10+ years building highly scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems in production, with deep hands-on expertise in Java, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes, AWS, and Postgres.
• Deep experience with event-driven architecture and async messaging — consumer group design, partition strategies, and exactly-once delivery under real constraints.
• Proven ability to lead complex technical initiatives across multiple domains, influencing architecture decisions without direct authority.
• Solid production instincts — you've stabilized live systems under pressure and led post-mortems that actually changed how things are built.
• Comfortable operating where engineering and trading economics intersect: you can tie a technical decision to P&L impact and make the case to both engineers and business stakeholders.

Preferred

• 5+ years building systems at the intersection of high throughput, low latency, and cost efficiency — ideally in real-time trading, financial infrastructure, or prediction markets.
• Working familiarity with quantitative concepts: pricing models, spread optimization, adverse selection, or inventory management.
• Experience in a startup or high-growth environment where ownership is broad, the architecture is still forming, and you've helped shape it.
• Background in C++ or Rust, or exposure to FIX protocol and exchange connectivity patterns.

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/

#LI-Remote