Engineering Manager, Search & Consumer AI

Fanatics Betting & Gaming•New York, NY

6h•$190,000 - $237,500

About The Position

Fanatics Core is the engineering organization building shared capabilities—including search, AI, and customer intelligence—used across Fanatics products. The Engineering Manager will lead the team responsible for Search and Consumer AI, shaping how fans find what they want, how AI appears in Fanatics apps, and how AI supports the customer experience. The team’s Consumer AI work includes customer-support AI such as LLM-powered assistants, conversational analytics, sentiment analysis, predictive troubleshooting, and tools that help customer-success teams act on AI-generated insights. It also includes embedded AI experiences in the fan journey, such as commentary, recommendations, summaries, and in-app assistance. Search work covers native search, query understanding, relevance and ranking, autocomplete, personalization, and AI search that enables natural-language and conversational queries. The manager will partner with Product, Data Science, Customer Operations, engineering leadership, and product teams across the ecosystem to set roadmaps, make trade-offs, and deliver high-quality outcomes for fans. The role involves complex, high-scale systems and requires a focus on innovation, collaboration, and engineering excellence. Occasional travel to Fanatics offices and other locations for conferences, events, meetings, and team building is required.

Requirements

1–3+ years managing a software engineering team, or significant tech-lead experience with people-leadership responsibilities, delivering complex, high-scale systems.
Experience in a Java and AWS ecosystem.
Experience shipping consumer-facing AI/ML or NLP features to production, including integrating LLMs and building reliable pipelines and evaluation practices.
Strong understanding of search, discovery, or relevance systems, including how traditional search and LLM-based approaches complement one another.
Strong technical judgment and clear, confident communication with engineers, Product partners, and leadership.
Ability to mentor engineers and build a healthy, high-performing team culture.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with AWS Bedrock or equivalent managed AI services.
Background in customer-support AI or embedded consumer AI experiences, such as assistants, conversational analytics, AI commentary, or recommendations.
Familiarity with Kafka, Airflow, dbt, OpenSearch, Kotlin, and Salesforce.
Experience building shared platforms consumed by multiple product teams.

Responsibilities

Lead delivery across Search and Consumer AI, owning end-to-end plans, including scoping and sequencing work, removing blockers, and managing risk.
Establish and maintain high standards for reliability, performance, relevance quality, and observability 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.
Partner with Product and engineering leadership on planning and roadmap development, using technical insight and fan impact to influence priorities.
Connect day-to-day execution to team strategy and Fanatics business goals.
Partner with product teams across the ecosystem to embed AI experiences, agreeing on shared ownership, interfaces, and quality standards.
Guide how LLMs and ML models are evaluated, integrated, and rolled out in production.
Coordinate across engineers, adjacent teams, and cross-functional partners to drive end-to-end delivery.
Represent the team’s plans, progress, and risks in planning and review forums.
Keep the team informed about goals, trade-offs, and decisions, and create opportunities for two-way feedback.
Hire, onboard, and develop a high-performing team; provide candid, timely feedback and invite feedback in return.
Mentor engineers in craft, ownership, and collaboration, and support their career growth.
Build team processes for planning, reviews, retrospectives, and experimentation that help the team learn quickly and ship reliably.
Be open to occasional travel to Fanatics offices and other locations for conferences, events, meetings, and team building.