Staff Platform Engineer, Data Storage - Core

Role Description

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 data 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.

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 data 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.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in platform, infrastructure, or database engineering, with deep hands-on production experience running PostgreSQL (RDS) at scale.
• 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.
• Infrastructure as Code expertise (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.

Nice to Have

• 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).

Salary Range

$172,800 — $216,000 USD

For information about our benefits, please visit .

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