Engineering Manager, Search & Consumer AI

Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform. We ignite the passions of global sports fans and maximize the presence and reach for our hundreds of sports partners globally by offering products and services across Fanatics Commerce, Fanatics Collectibles, and Fanatics Betting & Gaming, allowing sports fans to Buy, Collect, and Bet. Through the Fanatics platform, sports fans can buy licensed fan gear, jerseys, lifestyle and streetwear products, headwear, and hardgoods;

collect physical and digital trading cards, sports memorabilia, and other digital assets; and bet as the company builds its Sports book and iGaming platform.

Fanatics has an established database of over 100 million global sports fans; a global partner network with approximately 900 sports properties, including major national and international professional sports leagues, players associations, teams, colleges, college conferences and retail partners, 2,500 athletes and celebrities, and 200 exclusive athletes; and over 2,000 retail locations, including its Lids retail stores.

Our more than 22,000 employees are committed to relentlessly enhancing the fan experience and delighting sports fans globally.

Fanatics Core is the engineering organization building the shared capabilities, including search, AI, and customer intelligence, that every product across the Fanatics ecosystem builds on. We are seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the team that owns Search and Consumer AI. This leader will own some of the most leveraged surfaces we build: how fans find what they’re looking for, how AI shows up inside our apps, and how AI powers an excellent customer experience.
You will lead a team of software engineers spanning two closely connected charters:
Consumer AI: customer support AI, including LLM-powered assistants, conversational analytics, sentiment analysis, predictive troubleshooting, and the tooling that lets customer success teams act on AI-generated insights; and (2) embedded AI experiences in the fan journey, such as AI commentary, recommendations, summaries, and in-app assistance.
Search: native search, including query understanding, relevance and ranking, autocomplete, and personalization; and (2) AI search, including natural-language and conversational search that lets fans ask for what they want in their own words and get answers, not just results.
Success in this role requires strong partnership with Product, Data Science, Customer Operations, and product teams across the ecosystem to shape the roadmap, make smart trade-offs, and deliver outcomes fans feel. You’ll work on complex, high-scale challenges as part of a team that values innovation, collaboration, and excellence.

Delivery & Ownership
Lead the team to deliver against commitments across Search and Consumer AI, owning delivery plans end to end: scope and sequence work, remove blockers, and manage risk.
Set a high bar for reliability, performance, and relevance quality, with observability in place for AI and search services.
Ensure the team’s work meets Fanatics standards for data governance, security, compliance, and responsible AI.
Own on-call, incident response, and operational health for the team’s systems.
Strategy & Roadmap
Partner with Product and engineering leadership on planning and roadmap building, using technical insight and fan impact to influence priorities.
Connect day-to-day execution to team strategy and Fanatics business goals so engineers understand why their work matters.
Partner with product teams across the ecosystem to embed AI experiences into their surfaces, agreeing on shared ownership, interfaces, and quality bars.
Guide how LLMs and ML models are evaluated, integrated, and rolled out in production.
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