Lead Software Engineer, Collector Engagement Team

About Us

Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform. We ignite the passions of global sports fans and maximize the presence and reach for our hundreds of sports partners globally by offering products and services across Fanatics Commerce, Fanatics Collectibles, and Fanatics Betting & Gaming, allowing sports fans to Buy, Collect, and Bet. Through the Fanatics platform, sports fans can buy licensed fan gear, jerseys, lifestyle and streetwear products, headwear, and hardgoods; collect physical and digital trading cards, sports memorabilia, and other digital assets; and bet as the company builds its Sportsbook and iGaming platform. Fanatics has an established database of over 100 million global sports fans; a global partner network with approximately 900 sports properties, including major national and international professional sports leagues, players associations, teams, colleges, college conferences and retail partners, 2,500 athletes and celebrities, and 200 exclusive athletes; and over 2,000 retail locations, including its Lids retail stores. Our more than 22,000 employees are committed to relentlessly enhancing the fan experience and delighting sports fans globally.

About the Team

Fanatics Collectibles is the home of sports cards, trading cards, and collectibles for over 100 million fans worldwide. As part of the global Fanatics platform, we're rebuilding how collectors discover, buy, sell, and experience their hobby with world class technology and product experiences.

As part of Fanatics Collectibles’ continued global growth, we are establishing a new technology hub in Mexico City focused on operational excellence, platform scalability, trust, and customer experience. This team partners closely with Customer Experience (CX), Trust & Safety, Fraud Prevention, Payments, and Financial Operations organizations to build scalable systems and operational tooling that support millions of users and transactions globally.

About Topps Collector Engagement

Topps is transforming the trading card from a physical product into a connected collector experience. Through scanning, digital claiming, progression programs and partner activations, collectors can authenticate, track, unlock and redeem against the cards they own — bridging the physical product and the digital collector account.

Our Collector Engagement team builds that technology layer. The team delivers progression and quest experiences, redemption and reward mechanics, leaderboards, retail and live-event check-ins, in-venue collector moments, and the integrations that turn a scanned card into an account-level event. Programs launch against a calendar set by card releases and sports moments, so the team builds reusable platform capability rather than one-off campaign code.

The Role

We are seeking a Lead Software Engineer to lead a small cohort of engineers building the collector-facing platform behind Topps collector engagement programs while remaining deeply hands-on in the design and delivery of production software.

This role combines people leadership with senior-level frontend engineering. The Lead will be accountable for the team’s execution, technical quality and development, while personally owning and contributing to complex frontend capabilities, architecture decisions, performance and real-time interaction. Working closely with Product, Design, Backend and Platform Engineering, this role will translate program requirements into shared components, state handling and telemetry that serve many programs rather than one.

As a player-coach, this leader will set technical direction, establish priorities, coach and develop engineers, remove delivery blockers and raise engineering standards. The role is expected to spend significant time designing, coding, reviewing and operating production software while ensuring the broader cohort delivers against Collector Engagement priorities.

Responsibilities

Lead, coach and develop a small cohort of frontend engineers working on Collector Engagement, with accountability for team execution, technical quality and individual growth

Set team priorities, allocate work and coordinate execution against Collector Engagement goals, release milestones and program commitments

Remain deeply hands-on: design, develop, test and maintain complex application features and platform components supporting collector engagement programs

Own the technical design and end-to-end delivery of significant frontend features and platform capabilities, contributing directly where technical complexity or delivery risk is highest

Own the frontend architecture for program surfaces, including component model, state management, data fetching, and the boundary between shared platform and per-program code

Solve complex and sometimes ambiguous engineering problems involving performance, scalability, reliability, real-time interaction and user experience

Make sound technical and team execution decisions with appropriate independence, balancing program requirements, engineering quality, scalability, delivery commitments and long-term maintainability

Lead architecture decisions, technical planning, design reviews and the evolution of frontend engineering patterns across the cohort

Partner with Product, Design, Backend and Platform Engineering to translate program requirements into reusable technical solutions and clear engineering plans

Define and evolve API contracts, client workflows and integration patterns, and challenge contracts that push avoidable complexity into the client

Design the shared component and pattern layer with Design so a new program is largely configuration plus a thin custom layer

Establish and enforce performance budgets for experiences used mid-event and on low-end devices

Define the frontend telemetry standard so program analytics are consistent across surfaces

Write clean, maintainable, well-tested code and establish strong patterns and best practices through direct contribution, code review and coaching

Improve engineering systems and practices across release management, CI/CD, testing, observability, crash reporting and operational support

Proactively identify technical, delivery and team capacity risks; remove blockers; and escalate or adjust plans when needed

Lead execution for initiatives that may span multiple engineers, systems or partner teams, ensuring ownership, sequencing and follow-through

Provide regular coaching, actionable feedback, technical guidance and development support to engineers, and contribute to hiring and team planning as needed

Create an environment of clear expectations, healthy engineering practices and strong collaboration across the Collector Engagement cohort

Partner with engineering and product leadership on staffing, workload, delivery tradeoffs and execution planning for Collector Engagement priorities

Influence engineering standards and practices within the team and collaborate with adjacent engineering teams on shared technical challenges

Stay current with frontend ecosystem trends, libraries and development patterns and apply relevant advancements to the platform

Required Qualifications

5+ years of professional frontend or mobile development experience, or equivalent demonstrated depth of experience

Advanced proficiency in JavaScript and TypeScript and modern component-based development

Strong experience with a modern component framework such as React or React Native

Demonstrated experience designing and delivering complex, production-scale consumer-facing applications

Deep command of client-side state management and data fetching, including selecting the approach for a codebase rather than working within an existing one

Strong understanding of application architecture, API design, networking, asynchronous programming and application lifecycle management

Experience making architectural and technical design decisio