Senior Staff/ Principal DevOps Engineer

Senior Staff/ Principal DevOps Engineer

Fanatics Collectibles is seeking a Senior Staff / Principal Infrastructure Engineer to provide technical leadership and own the infrastructure strategy supporting the Topps China WeChat e-commerce platform.

This is a senior individual-contributor role with significant autonomy, influence and business-critical responsibility. You will act as the principal technical authority for China-based infrastructure, defining its architecture, operational standards and long-term roadmap.

Due to data-residency and access requirements under China's Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), certain systems and user data must remain within China and cannot be directly accessed by our US-based engineering teams. You will provide the essential in-country technical presence required to operate these environments securely and compliantly.

You will oversee infrastructure operated by key technology partners—including XCXD, supporting the WeChat Mini-Program, and Baozun, supporting order management and fulfilment—while ensuring that all systems meet Fanatics' expectations for scalability, reliability, security and performance.

This is not a traditional operational DevOps role. You will set technical direction, challenge architecture decisions, govern vendor delivery and establish a resilient infrastructure model capable of supporting the continued growth of Fanatics Collectibles in China.

Key Responsibilities

• China Infrastructure Strategy and Architecture

• Own the technical strategy, target architecture and infrastructure roadmap for Fanatics Collectibles in China.

• Establish architecture principles and engineering standards covering scalability, availability, security, observability, recoverability and cost efficiency.

• Evaluate current infrastructure and identify architectural risks, capability gaps and opportunities for long-term improvement.

• Make pragmatic technical decisions that balance global engineering standards with China-specific regulatory and operational requirements.

• Provide senior technical guidance for future platform integrations, market expansion and changes to the China technology ecosystem.

• In-Country Technical Ownership

• Act as the principal in-country authority for infrastructure and production systems that US-based teams cannot directly access.

• Serve as the highest-level technical escalation point for critical incidents, infrastructure risks and complex production issues.

• Own the technical operating model for systems processing or storing China-resident customer and transaction data.

• Ensure that operational processes, production access and engineering controls are clearly documented, auditable and sustainable.

• Establish runbooks, escalation paths and decision frameworks that reduce operational risk and reliance on individual knowledge.

• Vendor Architecture and Governance

• Provide technical governance across vendor-managed platforms operated by XCXD, Baozun and other technology partners.

• Review and challenge vendor architecture, deployment models, infrastructure controls and technical recommendations.

• Define and monitor service-level objectives, operational metrics and engineering expectations across vendors.

• Ensure vendors maintain appropriate monitoring, alerting, capacity planning, backup, disaster-recovery and incident-response capabilities.

• Lead technical reviews, incident post-mortems and remediation programmes, ensuring that root causes are addressed rather than short-term fixes applied.

• Hold vendors accountable for delivery while maintaining effective, collaborative working relationships.

• Reliability and Production Engineering

• Define the reliability and production-readiness standards for the Topps China e-commerce platform.

• Establish comprehensive observability across infrastructure, applications, integrations and vendor-operated services.

• Lead capacity planning, performance engineering, resilience testing and disaster-recovery preparation.

• Develop incident-management processes that enable rapid diagnosis, clear escalation and effective communication during critical events.

• Identify recurring operational issues and drive automation or architectural improvements that reduce risk and manual effort.

• Ensure the platform is prepared for high-traffic product releases, campaigns and commercial events.

• Launch Readiness and Performance

• Own the technical readiness framework for key milestones, including internal purchasing, soft launch and full retail launch.

• Define performance benchmarks, launch criteria and go/no-go recommendations for engineering leadership.

• Lead stress, load, failover and recovery testing in partnership with XCXD and other vendors.

• Assess infrastructure capacity across WeChat, payment, order-management and fulfilment integrations.

• Identify launch risks early and drive cross-functional mitigation plans through to completion.

• Data Security, PIPL and Regulatory Compliance

• Ensure infrastructure processing Chinese user data operates within approved data-residency and access boundaries.

• Partner with Legal, Security, Privacy and Engineering teams to translate PIPL and wider Chinese cybersecurity requirements into effective technical controls.

• Define appropriate controls for identity and access management, encryption, logging, auditing, data retention and incident response.

• Act as the senior technical point of contact for infrastructure audits, compliance reviews and security assessments.

• Maintain clear separation between China-resident systems and global environments where required.

• Cross-Border Technical Leadership

• Act as the technical bridge between China-based operations, external vendors and US-based engineering leadership.

• Communicate infrastructure health, architectural decisions, technical debt, risks and investment requirements clearly to senior stakeholders.

• Provide sufficient visibility to global teams without exposing China-resident data or requiring unauthorised system access.

• Influence engineering priorities across organisational and geographic boundaries.

• Translate complex infrastructure and compliance topics into clear business impact and actionable recommendations.

• Engineering Excellence

• Drive greater automation across infrastructure provisioning, deployment, monitoring and operational processes.

• Establish modern practices across infrastructure as code, CI/CD, configuration management and platform observability.

• Mentor engineers and vendor teams, raising the quality of technical decision-making and operational delivery.

• Contribute to global infrastructure standards while representing the specific requirements of the China market.

• Help shape the future China engineering organisation as the platform and business continue to scale.

• Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in infrastructure, DevOps, site reliability or platform engineering, including experience operating at Senior Staff, Principal or equivalent technical-leadership level.

• Demonstrated ownership of architecture and production infrastructure for large-scale, customer-facing platforms.

• Deep knowledge of cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, networking, Linux, observability, automation and production operations.

• Strong experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, containerisation and modern cloud-native engineering practices.

• Experience governing or auditing vendor-managed infrastructure and holding external partners accountable for technical outcomes.

• Proven ability to lead complex incident response, root-cause analysis, resilience planning and disaster-recovery programmes.

• Experience supporting high-volume e-commerce, payments, digital platforms or similarly business-critical systems.

• Strong understanding of security controls, data residency and privacy requirements within China, including practical knowledge of PIPL.

• Ability to influence senior stakeholders and technical teams without relying on direct reporting authority.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain technical risks and decisions to both engineering and business audiences.

• Professional fluency in Mandarin and English.

• Based in China and legally authorised to work in-country.

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

• Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with China-based cloud platforms such as Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Huawei Cloud or AWS China.

• Strong familiarity with WeChat Mini-Program architecture, WeChat Pay and the wider China digital ecosystem.

• Experience integrating e-commerce platforms with order-management, payment, warehouse or fulfilment systems.

• Previous responsibility for launching and scaling a new platform or market from an early stage.

• Experience operating wi