Staff Platform Engineer, Data Storage - Core

Fanatics Betting & Gaming is seeking a Staff Platform Storage Engineer to own critical database and streaming infrastructure and serve as an embedded technical partner to product teams. The role leads reliability and performance initiatives, operates PostgreSQL and Kafka/MSK platforms, and builds self-service tooling for infrastructure resources.

Responsibilities:

• Own database liaison responsibility for a portfolio of production PostgreSQL/RDS instances — query review, schema change approval, performance tuning, and incident triage for the teams built on top of them
• Operate and evolve our Kafka/MSK streaming platform: topic lifecycle management via GitOps, cluster health across environments, and CDC (Debezium) pipeline reliability
• Build and maintain self-service tooling that lets product teams provision database and streaming resources without a manual ticket queue
• Drive platform stability projects — operator/version upgrades, root-cause fixes for recurring operational issues, and proactive capacity/cost optimization across the database and streaming fleet
• Act as the technical escalation point for cross-team incidents where the root cause traces back to shared platform infrastructure (replication lag, connection exhaustion, CPU/throughput issues)
• Represent Platform Storage in cross-org infrastructure initiatives and standardization efforts
• Mentor engineers and participate in on-call rotations

Requirements:

• Strong, hands-on Python — a primary tool of the role, not incidental
• 8+ years of experience in platform, infrastructure, or database engineering, with deep hands-on experience operating and running PostgreSQL (RDS) in production at scale — this is an infrastructure-ownership role, not an application-development role that happens to use Postgres
• Strong experience operating Kafka (MSK or self-managed) in production, including topic management and CDC/event-streaming pipelines
• Strong SQL fluency — comfortable diagnosing query performance issues and reviewing schema changes for teams you don't sit inside of
• Working knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
• Experience owning production database reliability across multiple downstream teams simultaneously — able to prioritize across a portfolio, not just one system
• Strong cross-team communicator; this role is equal parts infrastructure engineering and technical partnership with the teams you support
• 5+ years using Python day-to-day is a strong signal
• Experience with GitOps-managed Kubernetes operators (Strimzi or equivalent) for stream infrastructure
• MongoDB or DynamoDB operational experience
• 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)