Senior Vice President, Software Engineering

Senior Vice President, Software Engineering

Fanatics Commerce is the global leader in licensed sports merchandise, operating a vertically integrated platform that designs, manufactures, and delivers officially licensed apparel, jerseys, headwear, and collectibles for major leagues, teams, and events worldwide. With more than 900 e-commerce sites and a global omnichannel presence across digital, in-venue, and retail, Fanatics Commerce reaches fans in over 180 countries and powers official fan experiences for many of the world's most iconic sports properties.

At Fanatics, we bring our BOLD Leadership Principles to life every day—building championship teams, obsessing over fans, acting with limitless entrepreneurial spirit, and delivering with a determined and relentless mindset.

As we continue to scale our global platform, the Senior Vice President, Software Engineering – Ecommerce Platform Front-End will play a critical role in owning engineering quality, performance, and reliability of the fan-facing ecommerce experience.

ROLE OVERVIEW

Fanatics Commerce is seeking a Senior Vice President of Software Engineering to own and elevate the technology powering our ecommerce platform, leading a ~180-person Engineering and Business Intelligence organization through senior engineering leaders. This is a hands-on executive leadership role for someone with deep and current technical judgment on modern front-end and distributed systems, a track record of growing large engineering organizations, and the executive presence to serve as incident commander when it matters most. The Senior Vice President, Software Engineering – Ecommerce Platform Front-End delivers business and fan impact through BOLD leadership and execution excellence, leveraging data, automation, and AI-enabled insights.

HOW WILL YOU DRIVE IMPACT

Success is measured by the ability to deliver results through BOLD capabilities and measurable outcomes.

Team & Leadership Impact (Build Championship Teams)

Cross-Functional Leadership:

• Partner closely with Product, Marketing, Merchandising, and Operations stakeholders to iterate on existing technology and identify opportunities for innovation that grow the business and advance company objectives.
• Maintain credibility and trust with both senior engineers and executive stakeholders through clear, direct communication that bridges technical complexity and business impact.
• Serve as the C-suite point of contact during high-stakes incidents, directing cross-team response, communicating business impact and recovery options, and driving root-cause resolution.

People Leadership:

• Build, lead, and grow a senior engineering leadership team, owning hiring, performance management, succession planning, and delivery accountability across the ~180-person organization.
• Recruit, develop, and retain high-caliber engineering leaders and individual contributors, holding a high bar for technical excellence and organizational capability.
• Scale empowered agile teams and modern delivery practices — including CI/CD, automated testing, feature flags, and progressive rollout/rollback — across the full engineering organization.

Fan & Customer Impact (Obsessed with Fans)

• Set and enforce technical direction and quality bar for the front-end stack, including server/client rendering strategy, CDN caching, accessibility, and browser performance, connecting Core Web Vitals and real-user monitoring directly to conversion and customer experience outcomes.
• Advance marketing platforms — CRM, customer data, and real-time activation — alongside strong data quality and governance, partnering with Data Science on personalization and measurable customer outcomes.
• Own architecture and operational excellence for high-volume cloud production services, ensuring microservices domain boundaries, API contracts, asynchronous messaging, caching, data consistency, and idempotency are designed for reliability and scale.
• Establish service-level objectives, error budgets, observability, and on-call ownership to protect the fan experience during peak traffic and high-demand commerce moments.

Innovation & Problem Solving (Limitless Entrepreneurial Spirit)

• Drive adoption of AI coding agents and assistants across engineering teams — with training, review, testing, and data controls — and demonstrate measurable gains in lead time and quality, not just adoption.
• Transform the organization to become AI native, evolving the development process to make full use of new AI capabilities and turning data and AI into scalable improvements in marketing effectiveness, engagement, and growth.
• Partner with Data Science on ML-driven personalization across customer journeys, using rigorous experimentation to drive measurable improvements in conversion, engagement, and retention.
• Identify and pursue platform innovation opportunities — including applied AI for search and recommendations, checkout and payments, and developer self-service — that advance the company's objective of becoming a beloved brand.

Ownership & Execution (Determined & Relentless Mindset)

• Own hiring and succession planning for senior engineering leaders, ensuring the organization has the depth and continuity to deliver at scale.
• Serve as executive incident commander for time-critical production issues: direct cross-team response, communicate business impact and recovery options in real time, and ensure durable root-cause fixes are implemented.
• Drive cloud production reliability through proven use of load testing, autoscaling, and resilience practices, with the ability to quantify peak throughput, tail latency, availability, and recovery improvements.
• Embed security in delivery, improve cloud unit economics, and maintain rigorous oversight of engineering quality, technical debt, and investment trade-offs across the organization.

AI & DIGITAL CAPABILITY

We are building a future-ready organization. This role is expected to:

• Apply AI and technology to improve efficiency, quality, and outcomes
• Use data and digital tools to inform decisions and enhance performance
• Demonstrate curiosity and adaptability in adopting new technologies and ways of working
• Contribute to a culture of innovation and continuous improvement

CAPABILITIES & EXPERIENCE YOU BRING

Required Qualifications:

• Demonstrated track record of building, leading, and growing an internal engineering organization of comparable scale (~180 persons or more) through senior leaders, with specific examples of engineering leaders and ICs recruited, developed, and retained — consulting or oversight experience alone does not meet the bar.
• Deep and current technical judgment on modern front-end stacks (React/TypeScript or comparable), including server/client rendering, CDN caching, accessibility, browser performance, and native vs. web vs. hybrid app trade-offs; has owned the stack behind a very large-scale consumer experience.
• Hands-on ownership of high-volume cloud production services, with the ability to recognize clean design and balance in microservices architecture, API contracts, asynchronous messaging, caching, data consistency, and idempotency, and to articulate latency, resilience, and cost trade-offs.
• Proven experience scaling empowered agile teams and modern delivery practices — CI/CD, automated testing, feature flags, progressive rollout/rollback — and deploying AI coding agents and assistants with training, review, testing, and data controls with demonstrated gains in lead time and quality.
• Executive incident leadership experience: has served as CEO/C-suite point of contact for time-critical production issues, directed cross-team incident response, communicated business impact and recovery options, and driven root-cause fixes while maintaining credibility with both senior engineers and executive stakeholders.
• Strong partnership capability with Product, Marketing, Merchandising, and Operations, with a track record of translating business objectives into engineering strategy and measurable fan-facing outcomes.
• Experience leading engineering for modern marketing platforms, including CRM and customer data platforms, with proven ability to partner with Data Science on ML-driven personalization and measurable improvements in conversion, engagement, and retention through rigorous experimentation — preferred but strongly valued.

WORK LOCATION

Hybrid: The primary place of performance of this role is the Company's office located in Redwood City, CA, subject to the Company's current hybrid work policy. This role currently requires in-office presence Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

At Fanatics, we operate with a BOLD mindset—We Build Championship Teams, we're Obsessed with Fans, we embrace a Limitless Entrepreneurial Spirit, and we approach every challenge with a Determined & Relentless Mindset. If you're ready to contribute to a dynamic, fast-paced environment that thrives on collaboration and growth, we want you to be part of our team.