Senior Software Engineering Manager - Geolocation, Compliance & Trust

Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform and is seeking a Senior Software Engineering Manager to lead an engineering team focused on delivering a secure, trusted, and seamless experience for customers. The role involves overseeing critical compliance systems and ensuring operational excellence while collaborating with various stakeholders.

Responsibilities:

• Lead engineering teams that own high-scale, high-stakes compliance systems across geolocation, state & self exclusion, responsible gaming, NJ data residency, and prohibited persons
• Drive operational excellence by setting high standards for security, reliability, and regulatory compliance
• Establish strong monitoring and alerting mechanisms to detect, prevent, and mitigate fraudulent activity and compliance violations
• Partner with Risk, Legal, and Compliance teams to ensure regulatory requirements, responsible gaming standards, and state-level gaming compliance obligations are met
• Own systems that enforce compliance gaming controls — including wager limits, session controls, cooling-off periods, self-exclusion enforcement, and problem gambling intervention workflows — ensuring real-time, accurate application across all regulated markets
• Oversee geolocation and location services infrastructure that verifies customer location at the point of wagering, ensuring players are within legally authorized jurisdictions and that geofencing rules are enforced with high precision and low latency
• Lead the engineering strategy for user sync processes — ensuring customer account data, eligibility status, self-exclusion flags, and compliance attributes remain consistent and up-to-date across all internal systems and third-party integrations
• Maintain and evolve systems that enforce prohibited persons policies — including detection, blocking, and auditing of individuals who are legally or contractually barred from participation (e.g., employees, self-excluded players, minors, persons on exclusion registries, and other regulated categories)
• Proactively identify and resolve technical or operational risks before they impact customers or business integrity
• Build and maintain high-performing, mission-driven engineering teams focused on trust, safety, compliance, and performance
• Define and execute a roadmap balancing customer experience, regulatory compliance, risk mitigation, and player protection
• Empower teams to solve complex challenges in real-time eligibility enforcement, data replication, and responsible gaming tooling
• Deliver robust, maintainable, and scalable software systems that protect customer data and ensure seamless, compliant account experiences
• Communicate clearly and effectively with engineers, Product, Data Science, Legal, and Compliance stakeholders
• Build deep partnerships with Fraud, Risk, Responsible Gaming, and Compliance Gaming product teams to align on goals and trade-offs
• Drive crisp technical and strategic discussions across teams and leadership
• Author and present clear documentation — including engineering roadmaps, vision documents, compliance risk assessments, and incident reviews
• Represent the CAT domain's technical perspective in broader organizational strategy and planning
• Lead teams through highly ambiguous security, risk, compliance gaming, and geolocation challenges with structured, data-informed approaches
• Foster a culture of accountability and innovation — balancing experimentation with rigorous controls
• Harmonize diverse viewpoints across Risk, Legal, Product, and Engineering to make high-impact, balanced decisions
• Provide clarity and vision amid changing regulatory and threat landscapes, including evolving state gaming commission requirements and exclusion registry mandates

Requirements:

• 5-7+ years of experience managing software engineering teams, with a track record of delivering secure, scalable systems in high-risk or regulated environments
• Background leading teams or contributing in a Java, AWS ecosystem preferred
• Demonstrated experience building systems for fraud detection, payments, compliance, or responsible gaming is highly desirable
• Experience with geolocation and location services technologies (e.g., GPS, IP-based location, third-party geolocation providers) used in regulated online gaming or financial services contexts is a strong plus
• Familiarity with compliance gaming controls — including self-exclusion systems, wager/session limit enforcement, exclusion registry integrations, and responsible gaming tooling
• Experience designing or managing user sync and data consistency pipelines across distributed systems and third-party platforms
• Exposure to prohibited persons enforcement frameworks, including integrations with state or national exclusion registries, age verification, and employee/insider restriction systems
• Ability to balance strategic direction with deep technical execution
• Strong communication and storytelling skills to influence across Engineering, Product, Risk, Legal, and Compliance
• Proven experience navigating complex, cross-functional, and regulatory challenges
• Commitment to operational excellence and building resilient, high-trust systems
• Passion for mentoring and developing engineers and leaders, while fostering a culture of security, empathy, and innovation