Senior Engineer, Android (Instant Rips)

About Fanatics Collectibles

Fanatics Collectibles is the home of sports cards, trading cards, and collectibles for over 100 million fans worldwide. As part of the global Fanatics platform, we're rebuilding how collectors discover, buy, sell, and experience their hobby — live, in real time, at scale.

Our flagship mobile product, Fanatics Live, is where that experience comes to life: live card breaks, real-time auctions, high-traffic chat, marketplace transactions, and deep collection management tools. The stakes are high and the traffic is real — we build for peak-load moments where latency is visible and reliability is non-negotiable.

The Role

You'll join the Instant Rips Android team — the group responsible for the live-break commerce experience on Fanatics Live.

We build the surfaces millions of collectors use in real time: bidding in live auctions, joining breaks, navigating a high-velocity chat stream, and transacting in the marketplace.

The Android stack is modern by design. We build in Kotlin, use Jetpack Compose for declarative UI, and rely on Coroutines and Flow for asynchronous and reactive work. We favor modular, testable architecture with clear dependency boundaries and build against backend services and real-time data streams that must remain reliable during high-traffic events.

AI tooling is part of how we work. We expect engineers to use it on the job, give it good context, and verify the output — not just accept it.

What You'll Do

• Design and ship production Android features across the live-break experience: auctions, stream viewing, chat, marketplace, and collector tools.
• Own features end-to-end — client and API contracts, state and business logic, Compose UI, testing, release, and production health.
• Build real-time experiences that remain responsive and correct through reconnects, lifecycle changes, degraded networks, and peak-load events.
• Write meaningful test coverage across unit, integration, and UI layers, including deterministic tests for Coroutines, Flow, and failure paths.
• Improve application performance, stability, accessibility, security, and reliability across a broad range of Android devices and OS versions.
• Diagnose complex production issues using observability, analytics, experimentation, and customer feedback.
• Review pull requests with judgment: surface real defects, prioritize what matters, and coach on what to let go.
• Contribute to architectural decisions involving modularization, state management, dependency injection, networking, persistence, and failure handling.
• Partner closely with Product, Design, backend, iOS, Data, and platform teams to clarify tradeoffs and deliver cohesive customer experiences.
• Mentor engineers earlier in their careers and raise the quality bar across the team.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years building and shipping consumer-facing Android applications at scale.
• Kotlin — deep proficiency with the language and the modern Android ecosystem.
• Jetpack Compose — state-aware UI design, navigation, recomposition behavior, accessibility, and performance-conscious composition.
• Coroutines and Flow — structured concurrency, cancellation, error handling, reactive streams, and lifecycle-aware collection.
• Android foundations — application and activity lifecycle, configuration changes, process death, networking, persistence, background work, and performance optimization.
• Architecture — experience designing modular, maintainable applications with clear state management, dependency injection, and testable boundaries.
• API and real-time integration — experience consuming REST or GraphQL services and working with streaming, WebSocket, or subscription-based data patterns.
• Testing — strong unit, integration, and UI testing practices using modern Android testing tools and dependency fakes or mocks.
• Operational excellence — hands-on experience with profiling, crash and performance monitoring, analytics, experimentation, and complex production debugging.
• Build and release — Gradle and CI/CD experience with automated build, test, quality, and release pipelines.
• AI-assisted development — practical experience using AI tools to accelerate engineering work while validating correctness, security, and maintainability.
• Senior-level ownership — a track record of independently delivering complex features, communicating tradeoffs clearly, and mentoring other engineers.

Bonus Points

• Experience with live streaming, real-time auctions, or high-throughput WebSocket or subscription workloads.
• Experience with marketplace, e-commerce, payments, or other transaction-oriented Android products.
• Experience supporting high-scale consumer mobile products during traffic spikes or latency-sensitive events.
• Passion for sports cards, collectibles, fandom, or live commerce.

Ensure your Fanatics job offer is legitimate and don’t fall victim to fraud.  Fanatics never seeks payment from job applicants. Feel free to ask your recruiter for a phone call or other type of communication for interview, and ensure your communication is coming from a Fanatics email address (including @collectfanatics.com).  For added security, where possible, apply through our company website at www.fanaticsinc.com/careers