VP, Engineering, Data & MarTech

Title: VP, Engineering, Data & MarTech Location: San Mateo, CA, United States

VP, Engineering, Data & MarTech

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 VP, Growth & Marketing Technology Engineering will play a critical role in unifying customer acquisition, lifecycle engagement, and data-platform engineering into a single revenue-driving organization.

ROLE OVERVIEW

This is a VP-scope engineering leadership role owning three integrated domains: digital marketing and acquisition engineering (including 130+ orchestrated pipelines, paid-media integrations, and emerging GenAI acquisition surfaces), martech and CRM/lifecycle engineering (multi-channel orchestration across email, SMS, and app push powered by Adobe Experience Platform, Journey Optimizer, and XtremePush), and the data, BI, and experimentation platform that both organizations depend on. Reporting to the SVP of Engineering, this leader sets technical direction across all three domains and leads distributed senior engineering teams spanning San Matero, Hyderabad, Brazil, and remote locations. The VP, Growth & Marketing Technology 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:

• Align marketing, product, data science, finance, and privacy stakeholders around a unified technical direction across acquisition, lifecycle, and data-platform domains, without formal authority over most of them.
• Partner with marketing science to stand up the data and activation foundations for incrementality and MMM/MTA measurement, and translate roadmap trade-offs fluently to Finance, the Chief Merchandising Officer, and executive leadership.
• Establish a clear operating model with senior engineering leaders so lifecycle and data/BI function as one integrated organization, not two separate teams.

People Leadership:

• Lead through senior engineering managers across distributed time zones (San Mateo, Hyderabad, Brazil, and remote), operating as a deliberate manager-of-managers who designs org structures and reporting lines intentionally.
• Hire, develop, and retain senior engineering leaders — with a demonstrated track record of growing people into greater scope and keeping them.
• Build and sustain a high-performance engineering culture grounded in evidence-based experimentation, continuous improvement, and psychological safety across a globally distributed team.

Fan & Customer Impact (Obsessed with Fans)

• Own the customer-acquisition economics behind Fanatics' largest paid channels — PLA/Shopping and paid social foremost — ensuring the high-throughput systems that power audience targeting, product feeds, and value-based bidding translate directly into fan acquisition at scale.
• Drive the martech and CRM/lifecycle stack toward decisioned, channel-agnostic, closed-loop messaging across email, SMS, and app push that ties every send to measurable fan-engagement and revenue outcomes.
• Accelerate the shift to AI-native acquisition surfaces — including GenAI-era product feeds, agentic keyword and ops automation, and social commerce — so Fanatics reaches fans through the channels and formats emerging in real time.
• Build the semantic and BI layer to be trustworthy enough to answer both human operators and AI agents, pushing self-serve analytics well past dashboards toward conversational, insight-driven experiences for the teams that serve fans every day.

Innovation & Problem Solving (Limitless Entrepreneurial Spirit)

• Move first with evidence in an unsettled AI-driven landscape — stand up small, measured experiments on AI-native marketing approaches, read the results, and scale what works rather than waiting for a proven playbook.
• Push paid-media diversification beyond Google and Meta by using incremental measurement foundations to de-risk and prove out new channels, expanding Fanatics' acquisition surface as the channel-economics landscape shifts.
• Architect the path from a fragmented engagement stack to a unified, channel-agnostic lifecycle platform — consolidating identity, consent, and decisioning layers while the business continues to ship at speed.
• Drive the BI and data platform toward a modern, lower-TCO foundation — retiring or consolidating legacy systems on committed migration milestones while pushing the semantic layer toward AI-enabled self-serve.

Ownership & Execution (Determined & Relentless Mindset)

• Move marketing efficiency (ROAS/CAC) and lifecycle-driven revenue on named campaigns, not dashboards — with a credible, defensible plan to protect both as AI reshapes acquisition and attribution.
• Ship a meaningful step toward closed-loop, channel-agnostic lifecycle messaging across at least two channels within the first 12 months, driving measurable revenue impact from the consolidated stack.
• Bank a data-platform cost-takeout that survives contact with the roadmap — owning the cost curve of the data and BI platform as a core accountability, not a secondary concern.
• Communicate in writing with a precision that moves decisions, and build executive confidence in a technical direction before the results are fully in — especially in an environment where AI is rewriting the rules of acquisition, attribution, and channel economics simultaneously.

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:

• 15+ years in engineering with a track record built specifically in growth, acquisition, or marketing-technology engineering at consumer scale — including hands-on fluency across the Google and Meta paid-media ecosystems and the data depth to be credible on attribution, experimentation, and channel optimization.
• Demonstrated ownership of customer-acquisition economics against real revenue targets at a large consumer organization — having sat on the business side of martech, not just built the systems, and used modern customer-data and measurement capabilities to make spend and lifecycle decisions pay off.
• Experience leading a martech or CRM/lifecycle platform consolidation, a BI/experimentation modernization, or an equivalent build/transform effort that shipped while the business kept running.
• Proven operator as a manager-of-managers who has built, structured, and run distributed engineering organizations across time zones — with specific examples of senior leaders hired, developed, and retained.
• Fluency translating between marketers, executive stakeholders, and staff engineers — able to defend a technical bet to a Chief Merchandising Officer and a re-platforming trade-off to Finance in the same conversation.
• Demonstrated ability to hold influence across marketing, product, data science, finance, and privacy stakeholders without formal authority, aligning competing agendas around a shared technical direction.
• Experience building or accelerating AI-native engineering practices — agentic workflows, AI-assisted SDLC, model gateways, or evals/observability — applied to growth or marketing-technology domains.

Education:

Bachelor's degree required, ideally in computer science, engineering, or a related technical field. A master's degree (MS or MBA) that deepens either the technical or the business-and-commercial dimension of the role is a plus.

WORK LOCATION

Hybrid: The primary place of performance of this role is the Company's office located in San Mateo, CA, subject to the Company's current hybrid work policy. This role currently requires in-office presence 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.