Senior Director, Data & Strategy

About the Role: Senior Director, Data & Strategy

As a Senior Director, Data & Strategy, you will be recognized as a technical leader responsible for spearheading Fanatics' Fan Ecosystem data strategy. This role demands a unique blend of strategic foresight and hands-on execution, empowering you to lead ambitious projects and set new standards for your team through innovative solutions. Your bold decisions will be crucial in balancing immediate business requirements with long-term technical excellence, fostering a culture of innovation and leaving a lasting impact on both your immediate team and the broader data community.

Overview of Fanatics

Fanatics is at the forefront of building a global digital sports platform, igniting the passions of fans worldwide through innovative products, services, and experiences. With over 22,000 employees globally, Fanatics strives to deliver best-in-class fan engagement across its commerce, collectibles, betting & gaming, and digital experiences segments. Our teams are united by a shared commitment to innovation, operational excellence, and delivering unforgettable moments for fans.

We are seeking a Senior Director, Data & Strategy to lead enterprise analytics, data platforms, and cross-product customer intelligence for the Fan Ecosystem. This foundational leadership role will own the insights and data infrastructure that power executive decision-making, investor narratives, and the enterprise's understanding of Fanatics customers and business performance. You will oversee the production data platform and enterprise analytics environment, supporting customer experiences, personalization, data science, and operational reporting across all business units. Furthermore, you will partner closely with leaders in Advertising and Loyalty, Betting & Gaming, and e-Commerce & Collectibles to transform customer signals into measurable enterprise value, driving a unified, strategic view of the fan across the entire company.

Key Responsibilities

• Enterprise Analytics & Executive Insights: Lead the enterprise analytics function, delivering CFO-, CEO-, and investor-facing insights on customers, product performance, growth drivers, and overall business health. Design authoritative analytical and science frameworks for board meetings, investor materials, and corporate planning, ensuring accuracy, consistency, and clarity of metrics that represent Fanatics externally and govern internal decision-making.
• Audience Network Data Partnership: Own and operate the customer and audience database powering the Fanatics Audience Network, guaranteeing high-quality identity resolution, segmentation, and activation capabilities. Partner with the Ads business to support new advertising products, measurement frameworks, and privacy-centric data architecture, driving innovation in leveraging customer signals for advertiser and rights holder value.
• Enterprise Loyalty & Customer Value: Collaborate with enterprise loyalty program leaders to design and operationalize data-driven strategies that enhance customer lifetime value, retention, and cross-brand engagement. Build the analytical and data science foundations necessary for offers, rewards optimization, personalization, and next-best-action systems, developing a unified customer view that supports experience orchestration across Fanatics' various platforms.
• Technology Ownership – Data Platform & Analytics Environment: Own the production data platform, encompassing ingestion, modeling, governance, and activation across multiple Fanatics operating companies. Lead the build-out, reliability, and evolution of the enterprise analytics environment, enabling self-service, experimentation, and advanced science workflows. Partner with Engineering, Security, and Product to ensure the platform meets SLAs for performance, cost efficiency, data quality, and compliance, while setting and enforcing modeling standards, definitions, metadata guidelines, and governance frameworks.
• Leadership & Collaboration: Build and mentor a high-performing team of data engineers, analytics leaders, and data strategists, fostering a culture of excellence, curiosity, and ownership. Partner across Commerce, Collectibles, Betting & Gaming, Ads, Fanatics Holdings, and Finance to translate business priorities into coherent data roadmaps, championing data literacy and responsible data usage throughout the enterprise.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience leading data, analytics, or data platform teams, including 5 years managing senior managers or directors.
• Proven ability to deliver executive-caliber insights, narrative framing, and KPI governance for CFO/CEO-level stakeholders.
• Extensive experience operating large-scale customer databases, audience systems, or identity platforms in advertising, CRM, or personalization domains.
• Strong technical grounding in modern data platforms (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks, dbt), analytics environments, and data modeling standards.
• Demonstrated success in building enterprise data systems that simultaneously support analytics, science, and product use cases.
• Exceptional cross-functional leadership, with the ability to influence at all levels and build trust across business and technical teams.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to simplify complexity and articulate insights to non-technical executives.

Key Skills/Competency

• Data Strategy
• Enterprise Analytics
• Data Platform Management
• Executive Reporting
• Customer Intelligence
• Data Governance
• Team Leadership
• Stakeholder Management
• Snowflake
• Databricks