Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineer, FanApp
Contract-to-Hire | Hybrid (4 days/week preferred, 3 minimum)

About the Role

Client is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join the FanApp team. In this role, you will help define and build the next-generation shopping experience within a universal FanApp, creating intuitive, high-impact journeys that improve discovery, personalization, engagement, and conversion for sports fans.

You will operate as a technical leader across the FanApp org, partnering closely with product, design, backend, data, and platform teams to set technical direction and deliver reliable, performant, and measurable experiences end to end. This role is a strong fit for a highly hands-on engineer who can tech lead ambiguous, cross-team initiatives, ramp up quickly, and bring an AI-forward, forward-looking perspective on modern frontend engineering.

What You''ll Do

• Drive the technical design, architecture, and delivery of complex, high-impact user experiences across FanApp surfaces including search, recommendations, merchandising, promotions, and product discovery.
• Serve as tech lead on cross-functional initiatives — setting technical direction, making build-vs-buy and architecture tradeoffs, and guiding execution from design through launch across multiple workstreams.
• Build robust, scalable integrations with backend APIs and services, with a deep focus on performance, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
• Design and champion instrumentation and eventing strategy to give the team clear visibility into fan behavior, feature adoption, experimentation outcomes, and funnel performance.
• Partner directly with product, design, and engineering leaders to translate ambiguous business goals into scalable technical strategy, then drive that strategy to high-quality delivery.
• Proactively identify systemic performance, reliability, and architectural issues before they become blockers, and lead the resolution across teams.
• Raise the engineering bar org-wide through rigorous code review, technical documentation, mentorship of senior and mid-level engineers, and hands-on contribution to critical code paths.
• Take ownership of the most ambiguous, highest-leverage problems on the team — defining scope where none exists, driving execution, and improving team-wide delivery quality and velocity.
• Champion AI-forward development practices, including using AI tooling to accelerate engineering workflows and evaluating where AI/ML can improve personalization, search, and discovery experiences for fans.
• Act as a thought leader on modern frontend engineering — staying current with the latest patterns, tools, and best practices in the frontend ecosystem and bringing that thinking into FanApp''s technical roadmap.
• Support and elevate production excellence: deep debugging, observability strategy, and release quality culture across the team.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor''s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building and leading delivery of consumer-facing applications or platforms at scale.
• Demonstrated experience as a technical/tech lead on ambiguous, cross-functional product or platform initiatives, with the ability to ramp up quickly in a new environment.
• Deep expertise with modern frontend or app development technologies and patterns, including component-based UI architecture and API-driven application design.
• Strong command of JavaScript/TypeScript and a track record of architecting maintainable, scalable, high-traffic user-facing systems.
• Extensive experience integrating with backend services via RESTful APIs and designing resilient, performant client-side data flows.
• Strong track record of embedding testing (unit/integration) and quality practices into a team''s culture, not just their own code.
• Excellent problem-solving, technical communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills, with the judgment to influence decisions without direct authority.
• Highly hands-on — comfortable writing production code daily while also setting technical direction.
• Proactive self-starter with strong ownership instincts; comfortable identifying problems before being asked and driving them to resolution.
• Genuine enthusiasm for and fluency with AI-assisted development tools and applying AI/ML thinking to product problems.
• Demonstrated habit of staying current with frontend industry trends and best practices, and translating that knowledge into team impact.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building native apps, mobile web, or high-scale ecommerce experiences.
• Deep experience with search, recommendations, personalization, experimentation, or merchandising systems.
• Experience designing analytics and event instrumentation strategy for consumer products.
• Track record of improving performance, observability, and release quality for customer-facing applications at scale.
• Experience operating in fast-paced, cross-functional product and engineering organizations.
• Prior experience as a tech lead or staff-level IC driving multi-team product or platform initiatives.
• Public thought leadership in the frontend space (conference talks, technical writing, open-source contributions, internal tech radars, etc.)

What Success Looks Like

• You consistently lead the delivery of complex, high-impact features with strong quality and measurable business impact.
• You raise the team''s engineering bar through sound technical judgment, strong architectural decisions, clear documentation, and hands-on execution.
• You operate with high ownership and proactivity — surfacing and solving problems before being asked, and ramping into new areas of the codebase and product quickly.
• You help FanApp ship better discovery and conversion experiences for fans through thoughtful, AI-forward product engineering and close cross-functional collaboration.
• You are recognized as a go-to technical voice on frontend best practices, both within the team and across the broader engineering org.