Fanatics · 2 weeks ago
Staff Engineer Software - Search
San Mateo, CA
Full-time
Hybrid
Lead/Staff
$190K/yr - $234K/yr
8+ years expFanatics is on a mission to deliver a seamless and personalized shopping experience for sports fans, and they are seeking a Tech Lead to guide the engineering team responsible for their product search functionality. In this hands-on leadership role, you will own the technical strategy, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product managers, data scientists, and designers to enhance the search experience for millions of customers worldwide.
eSportsManufacturingRetailSporting GoodsSports
Responsibilities
Provide technical leadership to the product search team, setting direction on architecture, design, and best practices
Own the search platform architecture, balancing integration with third-party solutions and custom in-house applications
Build and optimize search relevance, search typeahead, filtering, recommendations and ranking systems
Partner with Product, Data Science, and UX to define and deliver new search features and personalization strategies
Improve the performance, scalability, and reliability of search infrastructure to handle growing product catalogs and high traffic volumes
Guide the adoption of search metrics, monitoring, and observability to measure and continuously improve quality
Evaluate emerging technologies in search and information retrieval to keep the platform modern and competitive
Mentor engineers and collaborate with other leads to drive engineering excellence and career growth
Qualification
Required
8+ years of software development experience with at least 3+ years in a tech lead or staff engineer role
Strong experience with search technologies (e.g., Elasticsearch, Solr, OpenSearch) and relevance tuning
Familiarity with third-party search platforms and integrating them with internal systems
Proficiency in backend programming languages (Golang, Java, Scala, Python, or similar) and distributed systems
Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, and system design
Experience in building large-scale, customer-facing applications, ideally in e-commerce
Strong leadership and communication skills with a proven ability to mentor teams and influence stakeholders
Preferred
Bonus: experience with machine learning for ranking, recommendations, or personalization
Benefits
Health, dental, and vision insurance
401(k) plan with company match
Paid time off and holidays
Professional development opportunities
Flexible work arrangements
Company
Fanatics
Fanatics is a sports merchandise retailer that manufactures fan gear and jerseys across retail channels. It is a sub-organization of Kynetic.
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
Fanatics has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2021 (2)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageTotal Funding
$4.9BKey Investors
Clearlake Capital GroupNational Football LeagueAlameda Research
2022-12-06Private Equity· $700M
2022-03-02Private Equity· $1.5B
2022-01-01Series Unknown· $10M
Leadership Team
J
Joseph Bozich
Advisor to Chief Executive Officer
Michael Mahan
CEO
Recent News
Rochester Business Journal
2025-12-24
2025-12-24
Company data provided by crunchbase