Staff Software 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 Staff Engineer to own a critical domain within our market making platform — pricing engine, order management, data ingestion, or PnL infrastructure — and take end-to-end accountability for its correctness, performance, and reliability under live trading conditions.

This is a hands-on, high-ownership role. You'll work alongside our Senior Staff and senior engineers to build the systems that keep our markets liquid and our book healthy at peak volume. Real money is on the line every time our system quotes a price — the work is technically demanding, commercially consequential, and directly visible in daily P&L snapshots the whole team sees.

You won't be handed a spec. You'll be expected to understand the trading business well enough to write one, and to care about outcomes beyond just shipping the feature.

Responsibilities

• Own a major domain within the market making pipeline — pricing engine, order management, real-time data ingestion, or PnL/risk infrastructure — driving design, implementation, and ongoing operational reliability.
• Build and maintain systems that process high-throughput, low-latency event streams: market data, fixture updates, pricing feeds, and order lifecycle events across exchanges.
• Partner with our Senior Staff engineer and trading team on cross-domain technical decisions — contributing grounded domain expertise while maintaining the integrity of the broader platform architecture.
• Contribute to the exchange abstraction layer being built for our in-house exchange, helping define the APIs and integration patterns that will connect us to new venues beyond CDNA.
• Build and improve internal Trading UI tooling — dashboards, kill switches, position monitors, and manual intervention surfaces — that our traders depend on for real-time market management during live events.
• Diagnose and respond to production issues in a live trading environment: understand whether a bad P&L day came from pricing latency, a strategy misfire, a mapping error, or an adverse selection pattern — then fix it durably.
• Proactively identify performance bottlenecks and technical risk within your domain before they affect trading operations or our hold rate.
• Contribute to team-level engineering standards — design docs, code and architecture reviews, and patterns that hold up as we expand to new sports, market types, and exchange venues.
• Develop genuine fluency in our trading economics: understand spread logic, adverse selection, inventory risk, and where we make and lose money — and use that context to prioritize what to build and improve.

Experience and Skills

• 7+ years building scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems in production environments
• Strong hands-on proficiency with Java, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes, AWS, and Postgres
• Deep experience with event-driven architecture and async messaging — you've designed and debugged consumer group strategies, partition schemes, and delivery guarantees under real production constraints
• Demonstrated end-to-end domain ownership: you've designed, built, operated, and improved systems — not just delivered features
• Strong performance instincts — you think carefully about latency, throughput, and data pipeline efficiency, and you know how to measure what matters
• Clear, direct communicator — you can write a crisp design doc, explain a production failure to a trader, and debate an architectural trade-off with a principal engineer
• High risk tolerance for ambiguity and speed — you're comfortable deploying daily, working without a release train, and making good decisions when the spec is still being written

Preferred

• 3+ years building systems where latency, throughput, and cost efficiency are in constant tension
• Experience in real-time trading, financial infrastructure, market data platforms, or prediction markets
• Familiarity with FIX protocol or exchange connectivity patterns
• Working knowledge of quantitative concepts — pricing models, spread optimization, inventory management, or adverse selection — even if you've come at them from the engineering side

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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