Manager Data Engineering

ROLE OVERVIEW

The Manager of Data Engineering leads a team of Data Engineers and BI Engineers responsible for building and operating scalable, reliable data pipelines, platforms, and analytics products. This role owns engineering delivery, develops team members, and ensures high-quality, trusted data supports analytics, business operations, and data science. It also leads modernization across batch and streaming pipelines, data lakes, a governed semantic layer, and data governance foundations, while championing AI-first development. The Manager of Data Engineering 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 Data Science, Product, Engineering, Marketing teams, and Partners to support experimentation, marketing, funnel analysis, and scalable self-serve analytics
• Translate business requirements into technical designs, data contracts, consistent metric definitions, milestones, and measurable outcomes
• Communicate progress and risk clearly across technical and business stakeholders, making principled tradeoffs

People Leadership:

• Build, manage, and grow a high-performing, inclusive team of Data Engineers and BI Engineers with clear expectations, ownership, and career development plans
• Own the team's data strategy, roadmap, delivery commitments, and operational priorities
• Manage team budget, resourcing, and tooling decisions while balancing new capabilities with platform reliability and technical debt

Fan & Customer Impact (Obsessed with Fans)

• Deliver trusted, well-documented data products that give business partners consistent, governed answers for decision-making
• Enable actionable insights and self-service analytics through enterprise BI platforms (MicroStrategy, Tableau, Omni, etc.) and AI tools
• Optimize platform performance, scalability, and cost to withstand seasonal demand and traffic spikes tied to major sporting events and product launches
• Apply data quality, lineage, privacy, and access controls so the data behind fan and customer experiences can be trusted

Innovation & Problem Solving (Limitless Entrepreneurial Spirit)

• Champion AI-first development by embedding AI-assisted tools and agentic workflows into how the team designs, builds, tests, and operates data pipelines and BI solutions, with appropriate human review and validation
• Build AI tools and data agents that let users get insights from data through natural-language interaction, alongside canned reports and dashboards
• Build and maintain a semantic layer using tools such as dbt, Cube, and Snowflake that defines trusted business metrics once for BI tools and AI applications
• Evaluate AI-related tooling based on measurable value, reliability, integration effort, and cost

Ownership & Execution (Determined & Relentless Mindset)

• Own delivery of scalable, high-performance data pipelines and architectures on AWS (S3, EMR, Glue, Redshift, Lambda, Kinesis) and Snowflake-based cloud data warehousing
• Lead batch and streaming ingestion with patterns for incremental processing, change data capture, schema evolution, backfills, and recovery
• Use Apache Iceberg in data lakes to support ACID compliance, schema evolution, and versioning for large-scale datasets
• Drive data modeling and productization, designing dimensional and event models that become well-documented products for downstream analytics

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:

• 7+ years of experience in data engineering or related software engineering roles, including 2+ years of direct people management, with a proven ability to lead data and BI engineering teams and deliver production data platforms in a fast-moving environment
• Strong SQL skills and proficiency in Python; experience with Java or Scala is a plus
• Hands-on experience with Apache Iceberg or similar open table formats; Spark, Kafka, Airflow, or equivalent tools; AWS data services (such as S3, Glue, EMR, Redshift, Lambda, Kinesis); and Snowflake or a comparable warehouse or lakehouse platform
• Deep understanding of ETL/ELT pipelines, dimensional and event modeling, orchestration, and distributed processing
• Experience with enterprise BI platforms (such as MicroStrategy, Tableau, or Omni) and with building governed metric definitions or a semantic layer (for example dbt or Cube.dev)
• Ability to turn ambiguous business questions into durable data contracts, consistent metric definitions, and clear roadmaps, with strong prioritization, stakeholder management, and communication skills
• Practical experience using AI-assisted engineering tools and validating their outputs, with a working understanding of how data engineering supports analytics, machine learning, and generative AI

Education:

• Bachelor's degree or Master's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

WORK LOCATION

Hybrid: The primary place of performance of this role is the Company's office located in Redwood City, CA subject to the Company's current hybrid work policy. This role currently requires in-office presence {IN-OFFICE SCHEDULE —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.

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Salary Range 200000 - 230000 USD