Staff Engineer, Payments – Core

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in New York.

📋 Description

• Take ownership of the architecture for the payments platform, encompassing provider integrations, deposit and withdrawal workflows, and payment services utilized by various Fanatics businesses.

• Design and develop distributed Java and Spring Boot services that handle high transaction volumes while adhering to strict standards of correctness, security, and uptime.

• Create payment orchestration and routing systems that manage processors, acquirers, and payment methods based on approval rates, costs, and provider health, including failover mechanisms for underperforming providers.

• Strategize for potential third-party integration failures, addressing timeouts, retries, idempotency, duplicate callbacks, partial failures, and reconciliation with provider and bank settlement files.

• Oversee the onboarding process for new providers and banking partners, which includes evaluation, integration, testing, and deployment.

• Collaborate with Legal, Compliance, and Finance to implement regulatory and card scheme requirements.

• Work alongside the Fraud and Risk teams to address payment-path risk signals, chargebacks, and disputes.

• Aim to minimize payment costs by optimizing routing, negotiating provider terms, and reducing unnecessary financial transactions.

• Establish standards for security, data management, and minimizing PCI scope.

• Facilitate architectural reviews, design discussions, incident postmortems, and mentor engineering staff.

• Collaborate with product, frontend, and mobile teams to ensure a consistent customer payment experience.

• Define the technical direction for payments across various teams.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 8 years of professional software engineering experience.

• Extensive expertise in Java and Spring Boot.

• Proven experience in developing and maintaining production payment systems, which includes deposit and withdrawal workflows, payment gateway or processor integrations, card payments, or ACH.

• Strong comprehension of idempotency, reconciliation, and failure management with third-party providers.

• Experience in designing secure, high-scale, low-latency distributed systems.

• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and message streaming platforms such as Kafka.

• Working knowledge of payment data security and compliance standards, including PCI DSS.

• Demonstrated ability to set technical direction and foster alignment across multiple teams.

• Proficient in articulating complex technical trade-offs clearly to engineering, product, finance, and leadership audiences.

• Comfortable working in a dynamic, regulated environment with shifting priorities.

• Preferred: background in online gaming, sports betting, fintech, or banking.

• Preferred: understanding of card networks, acquirers, issuers, interchange, transaction classifications, and chargeback processes.

• Preferred: experience with payment orchestration, smart routing, or multi-business-unit payments platforms.

• Preferred: experience in integrating banking partners or developing account funding and money movement products.

• Preferred: knowledge in financial reconciliation and settlement reporting.

• Preferred: experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and observability tools such as Datadog, Grafana, or CloudWatch.

• Preferred: interest in enhancing developer experience, clean API design, and maintainable systems.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive base salary and bonus structure.

• Full-time position.

• Possibility of in-person onboarding events, including "Launching into Better: LIVE"—a multi-day cultural immersion in New York City.

• Comprehensive benefits information available at https://benefitsatfanatics.com/.

• Occasional travel to Fanatics offices or industry events for planning, collaboration, and team development.