Senior Interactive Engineer

Fanatics Collectibles•Los Angeles, CA

8h•Onsite

About The Position

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 Sportsbook 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. We're building a small, senior team to create exceptional real-time, web-first interactive experiences across our portfolio. Work that pushes what WebGL can do and sets the bar for high-craft fan engagement. We blend the creative sensibility of top interactive studios with the technical ambition of game development, and we're hiring the founding members who will shape everything that follows. This is a foundational hire. You'll define the technical patterns, systems, and standards this team builds on. You think in systems but care deeply about the end result. As comfortable discussing feel and feedback as render pipelines. You've shipped impressive work and know how to build foundations that scale from bespoke interactive pieces to full real-time applications and games.

Requirements

Deep understanding of browser-based real-time rendering and game runtime primitives, not just tools like Babylon.js or Three.js, but what's underneath: HTML canvas, WebGL/WebGL2, render loops, game loops, scene graphs, cameras, transforms, shaders, textures, buffers, draw calls, input handling, GPU/memory constraints, and browser performance tradeoffs
Fluency in GLSL concepts and shader debugging, with enough depth to support renderer architecture, performance, and creative technologist workflows
Expert TypeScript/modern JavaScript skills with a track record of well-structured, scalable codebases
Experience with entity-component or similar compositional architectures, game-loop patterns, and state management systems
An instinct for building extensible foundations other developers can build on
Experience in modern frontend ecosystems: shared packages/libraries, asset pipelines, API integration, performance profiling, and mobile web/WebView constraints
Leadership experience and communication skills to set direction for a growing team
A portfolio showing both technical rigour and genuine creative ambition
A track record of shipping interactive work to public audiences where quality of experience was the measure of success
Comfort translating ambiguous visual and experiential goals into concrete technical plans without needing everything specified upfront

Nice To Haves

Game development background (highly preferred)
Familiarity with animation/interaction libraries (e.g. GSAP) or physics libraries
Experience building and documenting shared developer tooling, SDKs, or internal frameworks

Responsibilities

Architect the core WebGL rendering platform for a growing suite of interactive experiences
Own the systems layer: scene management, asset loading/streaming, input handling, state machines, game-loop architecture, camera systems, transition infrastructure, and complex interactive sequencing
Write custom GLSL shaders with creative technologists, pushing beyond out-of-the-box capability
Define technical patterns, tooling, performance standards, and documentation that help the team move fast within shared engineering practices, code review, release processes, and systems owned by other teams
Own performance as a creative constraint: GPU budgeting, profiling, draw-call management, and cross-device optimisation
Partner with Creative, Product, Engineering, Platform, Mobile, QA, Analytics, and other stakeholders to turn ambitious concepts into polished, performant, production-ready experiences
Help shape the team as it grows, with a clear path toward technical leadership