Director Software Engineering

Overview 

As a Director of Software Engineering at Fanatics, you will be a technical leader with the ability to grow and scale engineering teams that can deliver business results and ship high-quality software with customer-facing products and internal platforms.  Your teams will be responsible for architecting, designing, implementing, testing, and maintaining the software to provide our customers with an industry leading experience.  This role involves both technical leadership and people management, ensuring that our engineering team is effective, motivated, and aligned with the company’s goals.  

We own the Fanatics App, the brand-forward application of Fanatics that encompasses elements of all of our different brands and businesses. The Fanatics App brings together Free to Play sports games, live events, ecommerce, and new product experiences to deliver a new Sports platform. Fundamentally, we are one team in everything we do from the user experience to coding and architecture. In order to deliver on our Customer Promise, we use best in class technologies; thus allowing platforms to be as up to date as possible so that we can rapidly deliver and innovate in this exciting new market.

You’ll lead the Ecosystem vertical of the Fanatics App, overseeing the teams that drive our Ticketing, FanFest and other experiences to our customers. This vertical is an exciting mix of launching brand new experiences, while building upon and scaling other ones to meet our huge demand.

Responsibilities

• Provide leadership and technical expertise within your engineering vertical
• Build and lead multiple teams that will deliver software while adhering (and contributing) to engineering best practices.  These teams will evolve/create architecture and/or product solutions that are exemplary in terms of their robustness, stability, scalability, and cost effectiveness.
• Ensure the right people are in the right positions, actively building succession plans and creating leadership opportunities
• Make business cases for communications externally (ex, blogs, whitepapers, patents), speaking at public events on behalf of Fanatics
• Build strong relationships with internal stakeholders across all of Fanatics, and collaborate with leaders to prioritize technical efforts and provide input on product features and capabilities
• Drive predictability and reliability through Operational Excellence and create clear objectives and transparency through the use of data and KPIs.
• Provide clear updates (KPIs, status, metrics) to an executive audience and key stakeholders
• Help identify technology gaps and opportunities, taking ownership for the technology roadmap within the space and ensuring appropriate engineering investments in the underlying platform
• Effectively balance opportunity vs. resources vs. sustainability
• Set targets for developer experience metrics
• Drive best practices across your teams
• Determine where to simplify, optimize, or extend solutions for the best outcomes
• Drive resolution to architecture contention
• Drive discussions around business and technology decisions, and participates in strategic initiatives with 1 to 3 year time horizons
• Mentor leaders on how to develop talent within their teams
• Help to recruit, assess and onboard a diverse group of talented engineers
• Develop solid understanding of our industry, product, feature set and roadmap
• Remain current on the latest technologies and trends in software development
• Must be open to occasional travel to Fanatics offices and other locations for conferences, events, meetings, and team-building activities

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience managing engineering teams, 2+ managing other engineering managers
• You are an expert technologist with experience in managing multiple teams that can influence and defend our quality posture
• You have knowledge of a broad range of design approaches and can deconstruct an architecture to be developed by different teams
• Demonstrated experience determining when to make a case for resourcing (and when not to)
• Able to effectively communicate complex technical subjects to a variety of audiences (engineers, technical leaders, marketing and operations teams, non-technical functional leaders)
• Familiar with Agile software product delivery and SCRUM methodology
• Excellent analytical and problem solving skills
• Excellent influencing and problem resolution skills
• Solid report writing skills with the ability to gather, evaluate and analyze relevant information while structuring material in a logical and coherent manner.
• You have an agile mindset; able to embrace new initiatives in a fast-paced environment
• Thrives in an entrepreneurial, hyper-growth environment where priorities evolve regularly and decisions are made quickly
• Team-first mentality, with a willingness to do what it takes to get the job done and a desire to strive for better
• Able to effectively work cross-functionally within an enterprise environment

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working in a start-up environment

If you possess some of these qualifications but not all of them, we still encourage you to apply!