Senior Staff/ Principal DevOps Engineer

Fanatics Collectibles is seeking a senior individual contributor to provide technical leadership and own the infrastructure strategy supporting the Topps China WeChat e-commerce platform. The role acts 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), the postholder provides an essential in-country technical presence for systems and user data that must remain within China and cannot be directly accessed by US-based engineering teams.

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

• 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.

• 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 within regulated, data-sensitive or geographically restricted technology environments.
• Familiarity with Chinese cybersecurity, network-security and data-governance frameworks beyond PIPL.

• In-country technical presence in China required for systems and user data that must remain within China.