How DraftKings Engineers Are Delivering at Speed to the Market

Who is DraftKings?

We have been building a strong Engineering Hub in Dublin for the last 2 years and have plans for continued growth. Our leadership was committed to opening an office in Dublin because of the reputation as a growing tech hub and source for top technology talent. DraftKings is a sports technology and entertainment company and a leader in the Daily Fantasy Sports & Online Sports Betting industry in the United States. This year, we are celebrating our 10 year anniversary and within that time, have gone from a small spare room in Boston focused solely on our Daily Fantasy Sports product, to building a global team of 3,800 employees working across 4 core verticals; Daily Fantasy Sports, Sportsbook, iGaming & Casino, and our NFT Marketplace.

Why do we need to deliver quickly?

Sports betting is booming in the US; there are currently 17 states where online sports betting and gaming is legal and with more and more states expected to follow suit and pass legislation, it has become imperative for DraftKings to not only be first to market but to deliver best in class, customer centric products and features in order to continue holding that market leader position.

How are we succeeding?

At DraftKings, we have positioned ourselves as an innovative and growing technology company sitting at the intersection of sports, culture and entertainment. Our teams are working to build innovative products that are clearly differentiated from our competitors. We look to our teams, our technology, and our shared collaboration to empower us to deliver on that success, quickly and seamlessly.

Teams

Our teams are broken out into squads of engineers who are dedicated to owning and managing specific areas within a product vertical. These squads have full autonomy to take ownership of their space and are built across each of our engineering hubs globally. It’s common to see engineers from Sofia, Dublin, Kiev, and Boston all working together in the same squad. They manage workload, pipelines, and their infrastructure both in the cloud and on prem. As a result, we look to hire engineers who can think outside the box, develop solutions for complex problems, and can collaborate across our global engineering team to reach the right solution.

Technology

To differentiate our products from those of our competitors, we know the technology and overarching tech stack needs to be able to support our long term goals. This starts with our engineering setup, we believe that if we want to move with speed, we need to provide our teams the tools to enable them and support that goal, including:

Top spec hardware
Latest software development tools
Build and pipeline tools
Cloud based development and test environments in the cloud
Industry standard collaboration tools such as confluence, JIRA, Slack, and Zoom

The technology stack used to build out our products contains many of the latest trends and technologies such as the latest .NET, front end technologies like React, Kafka queues, and microservices as well as NO SQL databases on the back end.

Collaboration

Collaboration across all disciplines is a cornerstone for our success. Each engineering team needs to align, engage, and communicate across all global engineering functions. Teams must align their work for dependencies, must engage other areas of engineering such as Security, SRE, and Architecture for guidance and support. This open dialogue and transparency allows our teams to reduce lag and blockers to our deliverables. The cross-collaboration between Product and Engineering teams makes a significant impact on our speed to market. During ideation, the Product Team engages relevant Engineering stakeholders early to help establish feasibility and t-shirt size guesstimation. This allows product teams to correctly prioritize their roadmap, ensuring the engineering squads are only working on the most important product features, strategically aligned to the roadmap. Our teams continue to collaborate during development with product support during story development, sprint demos, and acceptance ensuring our Engineers are building exactly what the Product team envisions.

We’re continuing to hire experienced Engineers as we continue to expand our team in Dublin. If you’re driven by innovation and pushing technology and entertainment beyond limits, we would be delighted to speak with you. Learn more about DraftKings and view our open positions: https://careers.draftkings.com/.

John Creaner | Director, Engineering