Staff Engineer Software - Search

Job Description

At Fanatics Commerce, we’re on a mission to deliver the most seamless and personalized shopping experience for sports fans. Search is at the heart of discovery, and we’re looking for a Tech Lead to guide the engineering team that powers our product search functionality. You’ll shape how millions of customers worldwide find what they need quickly, intuitively, and reliably.

Role Overview

As the Tech Lead for Find pod, you will lead a team responsible for building and scaling our search platform. Our current model blends third-party search solutions with an internal application powered by Elasticsearch, giving you a unique opportunity to drive innovation while optimizing for performance, personalization, and relevance.

This is a hands-on leadership role: you will own technical strategy, mentor engineers, and work closely with product managers, data scientists, and designers to deliver a world-class search experience.

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. 

Qualifications

• 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.
• Bonus: experience with machine learning for ranking, recommendations, or personalization.

Location

Hybrid work environment with flexibility between 3 days in office and 2 days remote work, based out of our San Mateo office.

The salary for this position is between $190,000 and $234,000 per year, in compliance with California's salary transparency requirements. This range reflects the expected compensation based on qualifications, experience, and location. In addition to the salary, we offer a comprehensive benefits package, including:

• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) plan with company match
• Paid time off and holidays
• Professional development opportunities
• Flexible work arrangements