Staff Product Manager, AI Control Plane

Fanatics Commerce is the global leader in licensed sports merchandise, operating a vertically integrated platform that designs, manufactures, and delivers officially licensed apparel, jerseys, headwear, and collectibles for major leagues, teams, and events worldwide. With more than 900 e-commerce sites and a global omnichannel presence across digital, in-venue, and retail, Fanatics Commerce reaches fans in over 180 countries and powers official fan experiences for many of the world's most iconic sports properties.

At Fanatics, we bring our BOLD Leadership Principles to life every day - building championship teams, obsessing over fans, acting with entrepreneurial speed, and delivering with a determined and relentless mindset.

As we continue to scale our global platform, the Staff Product Manager, AI Platform Control Plane will play a critical role in defining the strategy, governance, and scalable foundation for AI agents, tools, and applications across Fanatics Commerce.

Role Overview

Fanatics Commerce is building an AI platform to make it easier for teams to build, deploy, and scale AI-powered agents and tools across the organization, and the Staff Product Manager, AI Platform Control Plane owns the common capabilities that make this possible — registration, configuration, deployment, lifecycle management, security, governance, monitoring, and operation at scale. This role sits at the intersection of product, engineering, AI, security, and business needs, working as part of a globally distributed AI platform PM team alongside the AI Platform Adoption PM and the Business Solutions PM to create a continuous feedback loop between customer needs, business solutions, and platform evolution. The Staff Product Manager, AI Platform Control Plane delivers business and fan impact through BOLD leadership and execution excellence, leveraging data, automation, and AI-enabled insights.

How Will You Drive Impact

Success is measured by the ability to deliver results through BOLD capabilities and measurable outcomes.

Team & Leadership Impact (Build Championship Teams)

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Partner with engineering, security, governance, legal and business stakeholders to translate organizational requirements into scalable platform capabilities, creating clarity and alignment without relying on formal authority.
• Operate as a tightly connected system with the AI Platform Adoption PM and Business Solutions PM, ensuring clear ownership and strong collaboration across the platform PM team so that customer needs, solution patterns, and platform evolution continuously.
• Establish the principles, product standards, and architectural guardrails that guide the evolution of the Control Plane in partnership with engineering leadership.

People Leadership

• Create alignment across a broad range of technical and business stakeholders — product, engineering, security, governance — driving decisions through ambiguity and making difficult trade-offs with confidence and transparency.
• Mentor and model platform product thinking by demonstrating how to turn complex infrastructure capabilities into coherent products that solve real customer problems.

Fan & Customer Impact (Obsessed with Fans)

• Build a deep understanding of the developers and teams using the AI platform, distinguishing between individual feature requests and underlying needs that should shape reusable platform capabilities.
• Own the experience for developers and technical teams interacting with the Control Plane, reducing complexity in configuring, deploying, operating, and troubleshooting AI applications.
• Establish clear workflows, tooling, documentation, and self-service capabilities that enable teams to move AI solutions from experimentation into secure, governed, reliable production environments with decreasing effort and friction.
• Use developer feedback and platform usage data to continuously improve the Control Plane experience, ensuring teams view it as an enabler rather than a constraint.

Innovation & Problem Solving (Limitless Entrepreneurial Spirit)

• Stay deeply informed about emerging AI infrastructure and agentic patterns — including agent runtimes, orchestration, tool calling, MCP-style systems, model gateways, evaluation, and observability — and translate that knowledge into practical platform capabilities and product strategy.
• Identify common technical and product patterns that should become platform primitives rather than being implemented repeatedly by individual teams, building once and enabling reuse across multiple AI solutions.
• Balance developer velocity with platform reliability, security, safety, and governance, making pragmatic architectural and product trade-offs as the platform evolves.
• Build safety and governance capabilities directly into the platform rather than relying primarily on manual processes, defining requirements for guardrails, policy enforcement, auditability, monitoring, evaluation, and responsible AI controls.

Ownership & Execution (Determined & Relentless Mindset)

• Define and own the product strategy and roadmap for the AI platform Control Plane, establishing platform abstractions and standards that allow teams to build AI solutions consistently without reinventing underlying capabilities for every use case.
• Define how users, teams, agents, tools, models, and other AI resources are identified, owned, authenticated, authorized, and managed throughout their lifecycle, establishing clear ownership and accountability at scale.
• Provide visibility into AI usage, behavior, performance, risks, and policy compliance, enabling appropriate human oversight and intervention for AI applications where required.
• Track and drive success metrics including developer velocity, time to production, platform leverage, management and control maturity, safety and governance consistency, observability and reliability, and overall developer experience quality.

AI & DIGITAL CAPABILITY

We are building a future-ready organization. This role is expected to:

• Apply AI and technology to improve efficiency, quality, and outcomes
• Use data and digital tools to inform decisions and enhance performance
• Demonstrate curiosity and adaptability in adopting new technologies and ways of working
• Contribute to a culture of innovation and continuous improvement

Required Qualifications

CAPABILITIES & EXPERIENCE YOU BRING

• Proven experience as a Staff-level or senior product manager owning platform, infrastructure, or developer tooling products, with a track record of defining strategy and delivering roadmaps in ambiguous, rapidly evolving environments.
• Strong technical fluency in AI infrastructure, distributed systems, security, and platform architecture — credible enough to engage deeply with engineering on trade-offs, challenge assumptions, and make sound product decisions without needing to be the architect.
• Demonstrated understanding of AI and agentic systems, including agent runtimes, orchestration, tool calling, model gateways, evaluation frameworks, and observability patterns relevant to production AI platforms.
• Experience defining and building identity, access control, lifecycle management, and governance capabilities for complex technical platforms, with the ability to translate organizational security and compliance requirements into scalable product solutions.
• Systems thinking ability — can design for the broader platform ecosystem (agents, models, tools, data, infrastructure, identity, security, governance, developer experience) rather than optimizing individual components in isolation.
• Strong track record of influencing and aligning engineering, product, security, governance, and business stakeholders without formal authority, driving decisions through ambiguity and complexity.
• Experience using customer and developer feedback, platform usage data, and solution patterns to continuously evolve platform strategy and prioritize a roadmap for maximum leverage and reuse.

WORK LOCATION

Hybrid: The primary place of performance of this role is the Fanatics office located in Hyderabad, Telangana subject to the Company's current hybrid work policy. This role currently requires in-office presence.

At Fanatics, we operate with a BOLD mindset - We Build Championship Teams, we’re Obsessed with Fans, we embrace a Limitless Entrepreneurial Spirit, and we approach every challenge with a Determined and Relentless Mindset. If you’re ready to contribute to a dynamic, fast-paced environment that thrives on collaboration and growth, we want you to be part of our 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 Commerce is a leading designer, manufacturer, and seller of licensed fan gear, jerseys, lifestyle and streetwear products, headwear, and hardgoods. It operates a vertically-integrated platform of digital and physical capabilities for leading sports leagues, teams, colleges, and associations globally – as well as its flagship site, www.fanatics.com.

Fanatics Commerce has a broad range of online, sports venue, and vertical apparel partnerships worldwide, including comprehensive partnerships with leading leagues, teams, colleges, and sports organizations across the world—including the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, Formula 1, and Australian Football League (AFL); the Dallas Cowboys, Golden State Warriors, Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea FC, and Tokyo Giants; the University of Notre Dame, University of Alabama, and University of Texas; the International Olympic Committee (IOC), England Rugby, and the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA).

At Fanatics Commerce, we infuse our BOLD Leadership Principles in everything we do:

• Build Championship Teams
• Obsessed with Fans
• Limitless Entrepreneurial Spirit
• Determined and Relentless Mindset

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