---
title: 'Staff Backend Engineer at Fanatics Collectibles'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-backend-engineer-fanatics-collectibles-new-york-v666a16ffcp0'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-03'
---

# Staff Backend Engineer at Fanatics Collectibles

- **Company:** Fanatics Collectibles
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Compensation:** $172k–$215k
- **Posted:** 2026-10-22
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-03
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/fanaticscollectibles/jobs/4459041009

## Job description

## About Us

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 Sportsbook 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.

Staff Backend Engineer, Platform

Team: Backend Platform, Fanatics Collectibles    Level: Staff    Type: Full-time

## About Us

Fanatics Collectibles builds the ultimate platform for collectors, spanning Fanatics Collect, Fanatics Live, and Topps Digital. We are in the middle of a next-generation platform build: unifying our collector experience across products, and replacing point solutions with shared services that every product team can build on.

As a Staff Backend Engineer on the Backend Platform team, you will design and build the foundational services behind that effort, working hand-in-hand with the Client Platform (iOS, Android, Web), QA, and infrastructure teams. You'll set technical direction for systems that carry real-time collector activity, money movement, and identity at scale.

## What You'll Do

Architect & Build Core Platform Services

- Lead design and delivery of shared platform services over the next year, including a unified message bus, identity and user unification across Live and Collect, wallet, checkout, search, and discovery.
- Design event-driven architectures and streaming pipelines that move us from fragmented, product-specific events to a single, reliable, well-governed event backbone, including phased migration of existing producers and consumers.
- Own availability, scalability, security, and data privacy for core backend systems, including consent, PII handling, and compliance-by-design.

Own Key Initiatives End to End

- Spearhead zero-to-one initiatives from concept through production rollout, writing the 1-pager and technical design, breaking down work, and coordinating delivery across teams.
- Define clean, versioned API and event contracts with client engineers and partner teams so Live, Collect, and Topps Digital can converge on shared capabilities.
- Identify technical risk early, make sound build-vs-buy and sequencing tradeoffs, and communicate them clearly to engineering and product leadership.

Operational Excellence

- Partner with DevOps/SRE on CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, observability, and alerting. Define SLOs and drive down latency and cost on high-throughput services.
- Build for safe change: gradual rollouts, feature flags, experimentation, and zero-downtime migrations.

Raise the Engineering Bar

- Establish standards for code quality, testing, performance, and documentation. Lead architecture and design reviews.
- Mentor engineers, and help us hire and calibrate. We value candidates who have served as interview bar-raisers or loop leads.
- Explore how AI-assisted tooling and agentic workflows can improve both our products and our engineering productivity, and help the team adopt them pragmatically.

## What We're Looking For

## Experience & Expertise

- 8+ years building backend services in high-traffic, distributed environments, with a record of owning systems at Staff scope.
- Deep expertise in at least one major backend language (Java, Go, Python, or similar) and its ecosystem.
- Strong experience designing event-driven and streaming systems (Kafka, Kinesis, SQS/SNS, or equivalent), including partitioning, ordering, delivery guarantees, idempotency, and schema evolution.
- Solid grounding in microservices, REST/gRPC (GraphQL a plus), and both relational and NoSQL data stores. Experience with search technologies such as Elasticsearch or OpenSearch is a plus.
- Hands-on experience building and operating services on AWS, including serverless and managed services (e.g., Lambda, SQS/SNS, Kinesis, DynamoDB, S3).
- Experience with identity and account concerns (OAuth, account linking, authentication/authorization) and with privacy and compliance engineering (GDPR, tokenization, encryption, consent) is a strong plus.
- Experience in payments, wallet, checkout, or other transactional, money-adjacent systems is a plus, as is experience in marketplace or commerce domains.

DevOps Mindset

- Comfort owning services in production: containers (Docker) and an orchestration or serverless runtime (Kubernetes, ECS, or Lambda), plus infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or CDK).
- Familiarity with CI/CD (blue-green or canary deployment) and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK, distributed tracing).
- Track record of performance tuning and reliability work, with measurable results in latency, scale, or cost.

Collaboration & Communication

- Proven ability to work across product, client (mobile and web), QA, and infrastructure teams, and to partner with external platforms or vendors where needed.
- Strong written and verbal communication, with experience running design discussions and writing technical specs and 1-pagers that drive decisions.

Leadership & Mentorship

- Track record of leading zero-to-one initiatives and guiding other engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and coaching.
- Ability to influence technical direction and build consensus across teams in a fast-paced environment.

## Why Join

You will have real ownership over the foundation of a platform that spans multiple products and a passionate collector community, with visibility to senior engineering leadership and room to shape how we build.

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](http://www.fanaticsinc.com/careers) The salary range 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. For information about our benefits, please visit https://benefitsatfanatics.com/

USA Remote Salary Range $171,760—$215,000 USD

By submitting your application, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our [Candidate Privacy Policy.](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ff494b9931735466ce28d5b/t/69de53bde2c02c25e9c38758/1776178110037/Candidate+Privacy+Policy+April+2026.pdf)

Fanatics will never ask candidates for money, banking information, or other sensitive personal information as part of the interview process. If you receive a suspicious message claiming to be from Fanatics recruiting, please do not respond and report it here.

## About Fanatics Collectibles

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Fanatics Collectibles is a leading licensee, producer, designer, and seller of physical and digital trading cards, sports memorabilia, and digital collectibles, operating as the collectibles division of global sports retail giant Fanatics Inc.
- **Entity Type**: Private (subsidiary of private company Fanatics Inc.)
- **Headquarters**: New York, NY, United States (primary business roles); major operations also in Sunnyvale, TX and Tigard, OR [fanaticsinc.com](https://www.fanaticsinc.com/fanatics-collectibles)
- **Founded**: Division launched around 2021-2022 (parent company Fanatics Inc. founded 1995)
- **Founders**: Michael Rubin (founder of Fanatics Inc.); collectibles leadership team includes industry veterans

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Sports trading cards and collectibles (physical and digital manufacturing, marketplace, and livestream commerce)
- **Target customers**: B2C collectors, hobbyists, and investors; B2B partnerships with leagues, teams, and creators
- **Mission or purpose**: “Relentlessly focused on improving the collector experience and growing the hobby for the benefit of all” [fanaticsinc.com](https://www.fanaticsinc.com/fanatics-collectibles)

## Products & Services
- **[Fanatics Collect Marketplace](https://www.fanaticscollect.com/sell)**: An online marketplace for buying and selling trading cards, memorabilia, and collectibles, featuring vaulting, grading partnerships (PSA, CGC, SGC, Beckett), and consignment services.
- **[Fanatics Live](https://www.fanaticsinc.com/fanatics-collect)**: A livestream shopping app for live box breaks, creator-run events, and real-time card purchasing (launched summer 2024, acquired Voggt for European expansion).
- **Physical & Digital Trading Cards**: Licensed manufacturing of trading cards for MLB, NFL, NBA, and other leagues under brands like Topps and Panini (through exclusive league deals).
- **High-End Private Sales**: Partnership with Sotheby’s to sell cards valued at $100K+ [fanaticsinc.com](https://www.fanaticsinc.com/fanatics-collect).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Parent company Fanatics Inc. valued at approximately $31 billion (2024, per Forbes) – collectibles division share not separately disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Over 3.1 million total cards sold and 740,000 total collectors on Fanatics Collect platform [fanaticscollect.com](https://www.fanaticscollect.com/sell).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Fanatics Inc. investors include Silver Lake, SoftBank, and Michael Rubin. Key partners: MLB, NFL, NBA, MLBPA, NFLPA, NBPA, Sotheby’s, and grading services PSA etc.
- **Growth Signals**: Exclusive long-term licensing with major U.S. sports leagues; launch of Fanatics Collect and Fanatics Live in 2024; acquisition of European livestream platform Voggt; expansion into high-end auctions via Sotheby’s; 170+ open jobs globally [greenhouse.io](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/fanaticscollectibles).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Exclusive League Deals**: Holds exclusive rights to produce physical and digital trading cards for MLB, NFL, NBA (and related players associations), creating a near-monopoly on officially licensed cards.
- **Vertical Integration**: Controls design, manufacturing, marketplace, grading, vaulting, and livestream distribution, capturing value at every step.
- **Scale & Brand**: Backed by Fanatics’ global retail infrastructure, access to athletes, media partnerships, and a massive customer base.

## Strategic Focus
- **Digital Ecosystem**: Expanding from physical cards into digital collectibles, NFTs, and app-based marketplaces.
- **Livestream Commerce**: Scaling Fanatics Live (including international via Voggt) to replicate the social “breaking” experience.
- **International Growth**: Building presence in Europe (Paris, London, Frankfurt, Milan) and Asia (Shanghai, Hong Kong) with dedicated business roles.
- **Collector Experience**: Enhancing platform with AI-driven pricing (Card Ladder integration), instant payouts, and consignment convenience.

## Why Work Here
- **Dynamic Industry**: Work at the intersection of sports, pop culture, and technology with a company that “owns the conversation” in collectibles.
- **Growth Trajectory**: Rapidly expanding division with new products (live streaming, marketplace, international) and hundreds of open roles across engineering, product, marketing, operations, and more.
- **Global Presence**: Offices in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and operations hubs in Texas and Oregon; hybrid/office policies vary by role.
- **Culture**: Described as having a “world-class executive team” focused on innovation and operational excellence [fanaticsinc.com](https://www.fanaticsinc.com/fanatics-collectibles).
- **Notable Perks**: Opportunity to work directly with major sports leagues, athletes, and cutting edge live-commerce tech; roles in data analytics, software engineering, supply chain, and creative.

## Sources
1. [Fanatics Inc. – Fanatics Collectibles](https://www.fanaticsinc.com/fanatics-collectibles)
2. [Fanatics Inc. – Fanatics Collect](https://www.fanaticsinc.com/fanatics-collect)
3. [Fanatics Collect – Sell/Consign](https://www.fanaticscollect.com/sell)
4. [Fanatics Collectibles Careers – Greenhouse](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/fanaticscollectibles)
5. [Fanatics Collectibles Job Listings (171 jobs)](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/fanaticscollectibles/jobs/4208219009)

## Other roles at Fanatics Collectibles

- [Product Marketing Lead - Topps Experience](https://feeny.ai/job/product-marketing-lead-topps-experience-fanatics-collectibles-los-angeles-1dm4qheykhkn) — Los Angeles, CA / New York, NY
- [Maintenance Mechanic - 2nd Shift](https://feeny.ai/job/maintenance-mechanic-2nd-shift-fanatics-collectibles-sunnyvale-dk5y4njys2a3) — Sunnyvale, TX
- [Senior Manager, Instant Packs](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-manager-instant-packs-fanatics-collectibles-los-angeles-6p12a7eyxmdg) — Los Angeles, CA / New York, NY
- [Director, Asynchronous Instant Rips](https://feeny.ai/job/director-asynchronous-instant-rips-fanatics-collectibles-los-angeles-54rpq656fh2y) — Los Angeles, CA / New York, NY
- [Autograph Operations - Relic Inventory Associate](https://feeny.ai/job/autograph-operations-relic-inventory-associate-fanatics-collectibles-sunnyvale-v9xt9xvv1snq) — Sunnyvale, TX
- [Autograph Operations Sticker QC Associate](https://feeny.ai/job/autograph-operations-sticker-qc-associate-fanatics-collectibles-sunnyvale-pp37j1j1ep6q) — Sunnyvale, TX
- [Manufacturing Lead - 3rd Shift](https://feeny.ai/job/manufacturing-lead-3rd-shift-fanatics-collectibles-sunnyvale-3pa4j81214kr) — Sunnyvale, TX
- [Manufacturing Lead - 2nd Shift](https://feeny.ai/job/manufacturing-lead-2nd-shift-fanatics-collectibles-sunnyvale-8afp6y0c5b2n) — Sunnyvale, TX
- [Auto Ops Associate Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/auto-ops-associate-manager-fanatics-collectibles-sunnyvale-0mw2gefqb5j4) — Sunnyvale, TX
- [Packaging Engineer Co-op Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/packaging-engineer-co-op-intern-fanatics-collectibles-sunnyvale-wadm68f1fp3k) — Sunnyvale, TX