Manager, Software Engineering

Fanatics is seeking a highly technical Engineering Manager to lead two critical platform teams responsible for Search, Recommendations, and the Frontend Design System across Fanatics’ global e-commerce ecosystem. These platforms power product discovery and frontend consistency across 1,000+ sports and fan merchandise websites, serving millions of users worldwide. 

This role is ideal for a hands-on technical leader who thrives in fast-paced environments, actively contributes to architecture and system design, and leads teams to deliver scalable, reliable, and accessible platform capabilities.

Responsibilities:

• Lead platform development focused on search relevance, personalization, browse optimization, and scalable frontend architecture.
• Own and drive the technical and execution strategy across Search, Recommendations, and the Frontend Design System.
• Drive quarterly roadmap planning and ensure predictable, high-quality delivery across multiple engineering pods.
• Contribute to architecture and technical design reviews, ensuring systems are scalable, resilient, and aligned with long-term platform evolution.
• Partner with Product and Data teams to integrate ML-driven ranking and personalization capabilities into discovery systems.
• Establish and maintain strict performance, latency, availability, and reliability standards across platform services.
• Drive a high-velocity experimentation culture, leveraging A/B testing and data-informed iteration to improve engagement and conversion.
• Own the evolution and adoption of reusable React and TypeScript component libraries that ensure frontend consistency and accessibility.
• Set standards for frontend architecture, component governance, and client-side performance optimization.
• Provide structure, clarity, and operational rigor in planning, execution, and stakeholder communication.
• Identify risks early, communicate trade-offs effectively, and ensure leadership has clear visibility into progress and outcomes.
• Mentor and grow engineers and technical leads, fostering accountability, ownership, and engineering excellence across teams.

Qualifications:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years managing engineering teams in high-scale consumer, marketplace, or platform environments.
• Experience leading engineering teams in fast-paced environments with strong execution discipline and agile delivery practices.
• Strong technical background in search and relevance systems, personalization platforms, backend services, or modern frontend architecture at scale.
• Deep expertise in React, TypeScript, and modern frontend architecture, including state management and frontend performance optimization.
• Experience building, scaling, or governing reusable component libraries or centralized design systems used across multiple product surfaces.
• Experience delivering scalable, production-grade systems used by large numbers of users, with strict latency, availability, and reliability standards.
• Experience contributing meaningfully to architecture and technical design reviews, with the ability to assess trade-offs and guide technical direction.
• Experience operating experimentation platforms and A/B testing frameworks in production environments.
• Strong execution, organizational, and cross-functional leadership skills with the ability to drive roadmap planning and communicate risks and outcomes clearly.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with modern search platforms such as Google Vertex AI Search, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or similar search databases.
• Experience working with recommendation or personalization systems, including ML-driven ranking, relevance tuning, or third-party personalization platforms.
• Backend services development experience in Go (Golang) or similar high-performance backend languages.
• Experience improving engineering productivity through AI-assisted or agentic development workflows.
• Familiarity with modern AI-powered development tools, code generation, and automation frameworks.
• Experience integrating AI capabilities into platform systems or engineering workflows.

At Fanatics, we value transparency and honesty. If you don’t meet every single requirement, that’s okay – we still want to hear from you! We believe in the power of diverse experiences and talents. If you’re excited about the role and confident that you can contribute, don’t hesitate to apply. We’re genuinely interested in how your unique skills and perspective can help us build something amazing together.

The salary range for this position is $216,000 - $235,000, which represents base pay only and does not include short-term