Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform. The company ignites the passions of global sports fans and maximizes the presence and reach for hundreds of sports partners globally by offering innovative 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 over 900 sports properties, including major national and international professional sports leagues, teams, players associations, athletes, celebrities, colleges, and college conferences, and over 2,000 retail locations, including its Lids retail business stores. 

 

As a market leader with more than 18,000 employees, and hundreds of partners, suppliers, and vendors worldwide, we take responsibility for driving toward more ethical and sustainable practices. We are committed to building an inclusive Fanatics community, reflecting and representing society at every level of the business, including our employees, vendors, partners and fans. Fanatics is also dedicated to making a positive impact in the communities where we all live, work, and play through strategic philanthropic initiatives.

 

We are a startup building products to transform the trading card industry. We aren’t a startup in the traditional sense, though. While we are a small team building new products from the ground up, we also have the backing of Fanatics – the world’s largest sports merchandiser with over 900 sports relationships and more than 81 million reachable fans. We have exclusive licensing deals with the MLB, NFL and NBA and the products we build will be used by millions of trading cards fans from day 1. We are out to reinvent the trading card industry, which is a bold and ambitious mission.

 

Fanatics Collectible’s Data Engineering, Science, and Analytics Team is hiring experienced data engineers. You will be among the founding members of our team. You will help build a world-class data engineering organization with a strong data and software engineering culture. You will also establish, advocate, and execute data strategy and technical capabilities that support the business and enable data-driven decisions. Ideally, you are passionate about the trading card industry, sports, and importantly, data and technology. Our data engineers are required to partner very closely with other engineering and business teams and understand our business needs. You will own high impact technical decisions and lead hiring efforts to help build out a world class data engineering team.

What does this mean as a member of the engineering team?

• We are fans-and-collectors-obsessed and product-focused. We work backward from the focus of fans and collectors to drive our technical work and the development of products (physical and digital) that will reach tens of million.
• We are agile and move at warp speed. We work hard and are not afraid to try, experiment, and pivot (as needed). We have a lot to do and are looking for folks who will drive projects to completion with a sense of urgency, but not at the expense of quality, scalability, and performance.
• We think about scale. The trading card market is massive, and we will be the de facto entry point into the hobby.
• We’re pragmatic. We embrace new technologies if they add business value.
• We are passionate about trading cards, sports, and data. We take data seriously and work tirelessly to ensure their highest possible quality. We build data infrastructure to enable the seamless flow data from source to impactful actions.

Qualifications:

• A computer science or equivalent experience required.
• 5+ years of experience as a data engineer or software engineer focusing on building data infrastructure, solving complex technical challenges at a large scale, and delivering data products that drive business impact
• Experience in architect, develop, deploy, and monitor a new, end-to-end data infrastructure leveraging cloud technologies that ingests data from a wide range of internal and external sources and enables user-friendly consumption of data for data-driven decisions
• Experience in designing data architecture for multiple database models such as RDBMS, document, columnar, graph, and key-value data stores
• Expertise in both SQL and Python
• Proficiency in Java and JavaScript
• Proficiency and both SQL and NoSQL database technologies
• Well-verse in modern cloud native data tech stacks
• Familiar with container tech such as Docker and Kubernetes
• Familiar with data and ML orchestration tools
• Experience in designing and implementing modern CI/CD pipelines with cloud native tools
• Strong computer science fundamentals and data/software engineering hygiene
• Excellent communication skills to be an effective bridge among our team, other engineering teams, and business partners/stakeholders

Key Responsibilities include, but not limited to,

• Research, architect, develop, deploy, monitor, and maintain an efficient, reliable, and secure cloud data infrastructure to enable data-driven decisions
• Collaborate with internal and external tech teams and stakeholders/business partners
• Research and integrate 3rd-party vendor data solutions
• Help develop, implement, and evolve our data strategy, which will include data governance, data security, and tech roadmap
• Establish and participate in on-call technical support
• Contribute to data engineering and science team recruitment process
• Actively mentor and coach team members on advanced technical methods, advocate best practices, and help others to grow their skill set
• Set a high standard for data/software engineering excellence through example
• Develop a strong understanding of Fanatics Collectibles and the trading cards industry