Staff Platform Engineer, Data Storage – Core

Postgres
UNITED STATES
October 20, 2026
Full Time
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Job Description

Company: Fanatics
Location: New York, NY
Workplace Type: On-site
Employment Type: Full-time
Pay / Compensation: $172,800 – $216,000 USD

About the Role

Fanatics Betting & Gaming (FBG) is seeking a Staff Platform Storage Engineer to join our Platform Storage team, based in the United States. This role owns a critical slice of our core platform infrastructure, including a portfolio of production PostgreSQL databases and our Kafka/MSK streaming platform, and acts as the embedded platform liaison for the product teams built on top of them. As a Staff Engineer, you will operate with a high degree of autonomy, leading complex database and streaming infrastructure initiatives, setting standards for reliability and performance, and acting as the go-to technical resource for schema design, query performance, and incident response across the teams you support.

What You’ll Do / Key Responsibilities

  • Database Liaison & Operations: Own database liaison responsibility for a portfolio of production PostgreSQL / RDS instances—including query review, schema change approval, performance tuning, and incident triage for supported teams.
  • Streaming Platform Management: Operate and evolve our Kafka/MSK streaming platform, managing topic lifecycles via GitOps, maintaining cluster health across environments, and ensuring CDC (Debezium) pipeline reliability.
  • Self-Service Tooling: Build and maintain self-service tooling enabling product teams to provision database and streaming resources without a manual ticket queue.
  • Platform Stability & Optimization: Drive platform stability projects including operator and version upgrades, root-cause fixes for recurring operational issues, and proactive capacity/cost optimization across the database and streaming fleet.
  • Incident Escalation & Support: Act as the technical escalation point for cross-team incidents where root causes trace back to shared platform infrastructure (e.g., replication lag, connection exhaustion, CPU/throughput issues).
  • Mentorship & Collaboration: Represent Platform Storage in cross-org infrastructure initiatives, mentor engineers, and participate in on-call rotations.

Requirements & Qualifications

  • 8+ years of experience in platform, infrastructure, or database engineering.
  • Deep, hands-on operational experience running PostgreSQL (RDS) in production at scale—this is an infrastructure-ownership role, not an application-development role.
  • Strong, hands-on Python skills used day-to-day (5+ years of Python experience is a strong signal).
  • Strong experience operating Kafka (MSK or self-managed) in production, including topic management and CDC/event-streaming pipelines.
  • Strong SQL fluency, with comfort diagnosing query performance issues and reviewing schema changes for external teams.
  • Working knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).
  • Proven experience owning production database reliability across multiple downstream teams simultaneously.
  • Strong cross-team communication skills, combining infrastructure engineering with technical partnership.

Preferred / Bonus Qualifications (if applicable)

  • Experience with GitOps-managed Kubernetes operators (Strimzi or equivalent) for stream infrastructure.
  • Operational experience with MongoDB or DynamoDB.
  • Experience with pgbouncer, connection pooling, and query-level performance diagnostics.
  • Prior work on platform cost optimization initiatives at multi-cluster scale.
  • Exposure to regulated or high-availability environments (gaming, fintech, or similar).

Benefits & Perks (if applicable)

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