Staff Engineer, E-Commerce Platform

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 Staff Engineer, E-Commerce Platform will play a critical role in architecting and delivering next-generation e-commerce platforms and services at massive scale.

ROLE OVERVIEW

We are seeking a Staff Engineer to lead the design, architecture, and strategic technical direction of our next-generation e-commerce platform and services. As a trusted technical advisor and recognized subject matter expert, you will drive complex, multi-domain initiatives independently — from technical vision through production delivery — while championing engineering culture, continuous improvement, and technical excellence across the organization. The Staff Engineer, E-Commerce Platform 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 with Product, UX/UI, Analytics, and Business stakeholders to define platform requirements, align technical strategy with business priorities, and translate complex trade-offs into clear, actionable direction for senior leadership.
• Establish architectural standards, design patterns, and best practices that raise the technical bar organization-wide and serve as the connective tissue across engineering domains.

People Leadership:

• Mentor and develop engineers across multiple teams, providing guidance on system design, technical growth, and engineering craft.
• Champion a culture of continuous improvement, psychological safety around failure recovery, and shared ownership of operational excellence.

Fan & Customer Impact (Obsessed with Fans)

• Architect highly scalable, fault-tolerant, mission-critical systems capable of handling millions of transactions while delivering exceptional performance and seamless customer experiences.
• Design and implement next-generation microservices, APIs, and platform infrastructure that ensure reliability, security, and low-latency response for fans worldwide.
• Lead adoption of AI/ML capabilities to enhance system reliability, developer productivity, and the end-to-end customer experience across digital touchpoints.
• Drive initiatives that enhance platform stability, compliance, and governance — ensuring fans can trust and depend on every interaction.

Innovation & Problem Solving (Limitless Entrepreneurial Spirit)

• Lead discovery and architecture for complex, multi-domain projects, anticipating technical challenges, designing for failure recovery, and triaging system-wide performance problems before they impact fans or business operations.
• Choose optimal technology stacks — weighing performance, scalability, cost, maintainability, and integration — to future-proof the platform and enable rapid innovation.
• Integrate AI/ML APIs and services (OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS SageMaker, Azure AI) and apply emerging patterns such as RAG, vector databases, LLM integration, and AI agents to solve real platform and customer problems.
• Define and drive migration strategies, version management, and backward compatibility approaches that enable continuous evolution without disrupting operations.

Ownership & Execution (Determined & Relentless Mindset)

• Drive full project lifecycles independently — from technical vision through production delivery — writing complete, actionable stories and breaking complex initiatives into executable work streams with clear ownership.
• Develop observability, monitoring, and operational strategies for highly available systems, including SLAs/SLOs, distributed tracing, alerting, and chaos engineering practices.
• Architect and maintain data platforms spanning ingestion, transformation, processing, storage, and serving — integrating data from many sources and building reliable ETL and data-flow pipelines.
• Establish and enforce CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and deployment strategies (blue-green, canary, feature flags) with robust rollback and disaster recovery mechanisms.

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:

• 10+ years of software development experience with deep expertise in data structures, algorithms, and large-scale distributed systems; 7+ years architecting cloud-native applications on AWS, Azure, or GCP, including serverless, containers, orchestration, CDN, load balancing, and multi-region deployments.
• Expert-level command of distributed systems, microservices architecture, event-driven architecture, domain-driven design, and cloud-native design patterns, with mastery of multiple programming languages (Java, Python, Go, Node.js, or equivalent).
• Proven expertise designing RESTful/GraphQL APIs, service contracts, versioning strategies, and multi-consumer API architectures, including data exchanges and integrations with third-party web services.
• Deep experience with SQL/NoSQL databases (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra, MySQL, Redshift, Snowflake) including sharding, partitioning, replication, and consistency models, as well as Big Data technologies such as Apache Spark, Flink, Kafka, Amazon EMR, and Hive.
• Demonstrated experience building Data Platforms end-to-end — designing data models, integrating multi-source data, and building ETL and data-flow pipelines — with strong data analysis and visualization skills to make clear, data-backed arguments.
• Proficiency using AI-powered development tools (GitHub Copilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer, ChatGPT, and equivalent) and experience integrating AI/ML APIs and services, including understanding of prompt engineering, LLM integration patterns, RAG vs. fine-tuning trade-offs, vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector), and AI-assisted testing and code review.
• Strong expertise in CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability design (SLAs/SLOs, distributed tracing, chaos engineering), security best practices (authentication/authorization, data protection, regulatory compliance), and high-performance, low-latency system design including caching strategies, rate limiting, and traffic management.

Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience required; Master's degree preferred.

WORK LOCATION

Hybrid: The primary place of performance of this role is the Company's office located in Hyderabad, India, subject to the Company's current hybrid work policy. This role currently requires in-office presence {{IN-OFFICE SCHEDULE — e.g. "Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday" or "3 days per week"}}.

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.