Staff Engineer, Payments - Core

Overview

Fanatics Betting & Gaming (FBG) is the online and retail sports betting subsidiary of Fanatics Holdings, Inc. As a Staff Engineer on the Payments team, you will be the technical owner of the systems that move money into, out of, and across Fanatics: deposits, withdrawals, and payments at checkout.

The platform you will own serves Sportsbook and Casino today and is being extended to other Fanatics businesses. A key part of that work is letting a customer's shared balance appear as a payment option alongside cards and bank transfers wherever they shop, so that money already held at Fanatics does not have to leave and come back. You will also shape how Fanatics connects to processors, acquirers, and banking partners, with the aim of improving approval rates, lowering cost per transaction, and reducing the number of times the same funds are moved.

This role combines deep backend expertise with architectural leadership. You will set the technical direction for payments across several teams and work closely with Fraud, Responsible Gaming, Finance, Legal, and Compliance partners to build payment flows that are reliable, cost-effective, and compliant with state regulations and card scheme rules.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of the payments platform, including provider integrations, deposit and withdrawal flows, and the services other Fanatics businesses call to take payment.
• Design and build distributed services in Java and Spring Boot that process high transaction volume with strict requirements for correctness, security, and uptime.
• Build payment orchestration and routing across processors, acquirers, and payment methods, using approval rate, cost, and provider health to decide where each transaction goes, with failover when a provider degrades.
• Handle failure in third-party integrations by design, including timeouts, retries, idempotency, duplicate callbacks, partial failures, and reconciliation against provider and bank settlement files.
• Lead the technical work of onboarding new providers and banking partners, including evaluating options and defining the integration, testing, and rollout approach.
• Build in regulatory and card scheme requirements, such as per-jurisdiction rules and how transactions are classified, in partnership with Legal, Compliance, and Finance.
• Work with Fraud and Risk to bring risk signals into the payment path and to handle chargebacks and disputes, including how they are attributed when funds are used across businesses.
• Reduce payment cost through routing, provider terms, and design choices that avoid unnecessary movement of money.
• Set standards for security, data handling, and limiting PCI scope across payment services.
• Lead architectural reviews, design sessions, and incident postmortems, and mentor engineers across the team.
• Partner with product, frontend, and mobile teams so that payment experiences are consistent and clear for customers.
• Be open to occasional travel to Fanatics offices or industry events for planning, collaboration, and team development.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep expertise in Java and Spring Boot.
• Experience building and operating payment systems in production, such as deposit and withdrawal flows, payment gateway or processor integrations, card payments, or ACH.
• Strong understanding of idempotency, reconciliation, and failure handling in systems that depend on third-party providers.
• Experience designing secure, high-scale, low-latency distributed systems.
• Experience with event-driven architectures and message streaming platforms such as Kafka.
• Working knowledge of security and compliance requirements for handling payment data, including PCI DSS.
• Demonstrated success setting technical direction and driving alignment across multiple teams.
• Ability to explain complex technical tradeoffs clearly to engineering, product, finance, and leadership audiences.
• Comfort working in a fast-paced, regulated environment with changing priorities.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in online gaming, sports betting, fintech, or banking.
• Knowledge of how card networks, acquirers, and issuers work, including interchange, transaction classification, and chargeback processes.
• Experience with payment orchestration, smart routing, or building a payments platform that serves several business units.
• Experience integrating with banking partners or building account funding and money movement products.
• Experience with financial reconciliation and settlement reporting.
• Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and observability tooling such as Datadog, Grafana, or CloudWatch.
• Interest in developer experience, clean API design, and systems that remain maintainable as more teams depend on them.

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/