Senior Software Engineer - Exchange

About Fanatics Markets:

Fanatics Markets is the real-money prediction and trading app where you can invest in moments you care about. Built on a secure platform, we let users predict real-world outcomes and trade on events they actually follow - from sports and entertainment to political elections and beyond. Our mission is to redefine how fans engage with the moments and markets that matter most. We're looking for the right people to help us build the future of prediction markets.

Overview:

Fanatics recently acquired a CFTC-registered Designated Contract Market and Derivatives Clearing Organisation, giving Fanatics Markets its own fully regulated exchange and clearinghouse infrastructure. We are now building the engineering team that will run it.

This Senior Software Engineer (Backend) role sits at the heart of that build. You will have significant ownership over the core exchange platform, working on the systems that power order processing, market data distribution, trade lifecycle management and regulatory reporting for a CFTC-regulated exchange. The engineering challenges are those of any serious regulated trading environment, high-availability, low-latency, mission-critical infrastructure, but built for a consumer audience with the reach and distribution of Fanatics behind it.

You will be joining a team modernising an existing Java codebase and building new services in Java, working alongside engineers with deep backgrounds in regulated financial infrastructure. You will be joining a team with a clear ambition: to bring this platform to the bleeding edge of financial infrastructure. This is not a clean slate but the technical ambition is real, and engineers who join now will have a level of architectural influence and ownership that is hard to find anywhere else.

We are pioneering the use of AI as a code collaborator. We need engineers who have gone beyond experimentation and who actively use Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot, or similar tools to ship production code faster while maintaining exceptional quality standards.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the design, development, testing, and deployment of high-performance, fault-tolerant distributed backend services supporting the FMX exchange platform.
• Own services and features end-to-end: spec writing, implementation, instrumentation, deployment, monitoring, and iteration based on metrics.
• Work within and help modernise the existing Java codebase while contributing to new service development in Java and potentially Kotlin.
• Contribute to the architecture for order processing, market data distribution, and trade lifecycle management on a CFTC-regulated exchange.
• Build and maintain reliable daily reporting pipelines, ensuring data integrity and full audit trails across all trading activity.
• Participate in 24/7 on-call rotations, contribute to SLO definition, alerting strategy, and incident response for mission-critical trading infrastructure.
• Model and manage data for contracts, orders, positions, and settlements with an emphasis on correctness, integrity, and regulatory auditability.
• Collaborate with the DevOps/Platform team to ensure services are observable, scalable, and compliant with MNPI and insider trading restrictions.
• Conduct thorough code reviews, raising the bar on code quality, readability, security, and maintainability.
• Leverage AI tools to accelerate development velocity while maintaining high standards for security, correctness, and regulatory compliance.
• Establish and document team standards for AI usage, prompt patterns, code review checklists, and validation strategies.
• Contribute to a fast-paced environment, unblocking others and taking initiative where processes are still being defined.

Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience building highly scalable, high-performance backend applications or distributed systems.
• Background in regulated exchange or financial infrastructure strongly preferred, brokerage, futures or derivatives exchanges (e.g. CBOE, CME, ICE), market makers, or hedge funds with relevant trading infrastructure experience, or similar CFTC/SEC-regulated environments.
• Strong production experience with Java; Kotlin experience a plus.
• Experience with event-driven architectures (Kafka, Kinesis, PubSub, or similar) in a financial or high-throughput context.
• Strong understanding of data integrity and transaction management in PostgreSQL or equivalent RDBMS, including financial-grade data modelling.
• Solid grasp of software design principles (SOLID, DRY) and testing methodologies (unit, integration, end-to-end).
• Familiarity with CFTC compliance requirements, MNPI handling, and audit trail obligations in a regulated trading environment.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and safe deployment practices for backend services.
• Production reliability experience: monitoring, logging, alerting, on-call, and SLO definition.
• Demonstrated experience using AI tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, etc.) to ship production code; able to articulate specific workflow improvements.
• Communicates complex technical concepts clearly to engineering, compliance, and business stakeholders.
• Thrives in a fast-paced, high-growth environment where priorities evolve and decisions are made quickly.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Previous experience at a US-regulated financial exchange or licensed trading platform (e.g. CBOE, CME, or similar).
• Familiarity with low-latency trading systems, order book design, or market data infrastructure.
• Experience with low-latency in-memory systems and the performance engineering techniques required to operate them at scale.
• Experience with Aeron or similar high-performance messaging frameworks used in financial trading environments.
• Experience modernising legacy Java codebases in a financial services context.
• Previous experience in a high-growth or scale-up environment.
• Contributions to open-source projects or the technical community.

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 connections 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.

Ready to build the future of regulated prediction markets? If you possess some of these skills but not all of them, we still encourage you to apply! Please note that visa sponsorship is not available for this position. We are open to fully remote candidates based in the United Kingdom. Remote employees may also be eligible for a home office setup stipend.