Data Engineering Manager — AI-Driven Platform Leader

Fanatics Inc.; Redwood City (CA); Hybrid; USD 200,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Fanatics is seeking a Manager of Data Engineering to lead a team delivering scalable data pipelines, data lakes, and analytics products. You will own the data strategy, roadmap, and governance while partnering with Data Science, Product, Marketing, and Engineering to enable self-serve analytics and AI-enabled insights.

The role emphasizes modernizing batch and streaming pipelines, building a semantic layer, and ensuring data quality and reliability across fan experiences during peak events.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in data engineering or related software engineering roles, including 2+ years of direct people management.
• 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 (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

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of Data Engineers and BI Engineers to build and operate scalable data pipelines and analytics products.
• Own data strategy, roadmap, delivery commitments, and operational priorities.
• Partner with Data Science, Product, Engineering, Marketing teams to support experimentation, marketing, and self-serve analytics.
• Build data contracts, metadata definitions, and a governed semantic layer using dbt, Cube, Snowflake.
• Champion AI-first development and integrate AI tools into data pipelines and BI solutions.

Skills

SQL

Python

Leadership

Data engineering

ETL/ELT

AWS

Snowflake

dbt

Communication

Stakeholder management

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/Engineering

Tools

Apache Iceberg

Spark

Kafka

Airflow

Redshift

MicroStrategy

dbt

Job description

Fanatics is seeking a Manager of Data Engineering to lead a team delivering scalable data pipelines, data lakes, and analytics products. You will own the data strategy, roadmap, and governance while partnering with Data Science, Product, Marketing, and Engineering to enable self-serve analytics and AI-enabled insights.

The role emphasizes modernizing batch and streaming pipelines, building a semantic layer, and ensuring data quality and reliability across fan experiences during peak events.