Nasdaq listed company DraftKings employs over 2,000 people worldwide in the development and delivery of a range of sports entertainment and betting services. The company’s engineering centre of excellence in Dublin is responsible for back end technology and is now moving into front end and mobile development.
Software engineer Stephen O’Reilly joined the Dublin office in May and was attracted by the technical challenges as much as by his own interest in sports gaming. “We are dealing with very big technical challenges,” he says. “We are scaling up very rapidly and are launching Sportsbook in a lot of new jurisdictions. We need a truly robust system to handle unexpected spikes and high volumes of activity. We have to give each new customer the best first impression possible. You do all the due diligence you like to predict demand in a marketplace but the real test is when you go live and you’ve got to ensure the service can handle anything.”
We all have a sense of accountability for the services that we offer
Running the software in the cloud presents its own challenges, according to senior engineering manager Bryan Conneely. “Reliability is crucial. We all have a sense of accountability for the services that we offer. Our technology depends on other suppliers such as telecommunications providers and datacentre operators to run. Those services can fail or break down and the challenge for us is to engineer our systems to be tolerant of those failures. DraftKings has the cloud engineering processes to deal with that.”
These processes are relatively new. “Our Sportsbook technology has only been around for a few years,” adds Conneely. “We have to teach our people how to do it and how to deliver a service to our customers that is always available and as fast as they need it to be. From our customers’ perspective, they are not aware of the behind the scenes stuff. The great challenge is keeping it in the background.”
Director of engineering, Dan Kesack has been with DraftKings since 2015. “I have seen the move into sports betting in the US in 2018 and that’s definitely different to the fantasy sports business which DraftKings was up until then,” he notes. “Sports betting is highly regulated in the US.”
The other major challenge comes from the very nature of sports betting. “The app has to keep up with what is happening on the field,” he says. “A delay or a slow response is not ideal for us. The game will have moved on if there is any delay. It needs to be as close to real time as you can get, all the time. That is a real challenge.”
Culture at DraftKings
The DraftKings culture is another plus point for O’Reilly. “I joined in May when the company had gone fully remote as a result of Covid-19,” he points out. “I spent several months without meeting anyone face to face. DraftKings was fully aware of how that might affect people and reached out to help in any way they could.”
It's a new office and the people coming to work here are putting their own stamp on the culture
Team building was also impressive. “We are encouraged to use discourse channels like Slack and Zoom to communicate with each other. We also have Friday beers on Zoom and other social events like that.”
While DraftKings already has its own very positive culture the Dublin office is developing its own personality. “It’s a new office and the people coming to work here are putting their own stamp on the culture. That’s very good.”
He describes the onboarding experience as excellent. “I was helped a lot by the more established members of the team. I certainly felt people were aware that I was not able to tap a colleague on the shoulder to ask for help and they made an extra effort to reach out because of that.”
The Dublin office
That Dublin office culture is still developing, according to Conneely. “It has to be a little different to Boston culture. We have the same values and virtues, but the office needs to have its own culture, at least a little bit. We put a lot of effort into making sure our values and virtues are closely aligned. Our senior people talk about what we want the company to be in a year’s time. One of the exciting things about working in a company like DraftKings is that you can have an impact on that.”
I am so proud to work for a company that really adjusted very quickly to the working from home culture
That culture enabled a rapid response to Covid-19. “I am so proud to work for a company that really adjusted very quickly to the working from home culture,” says Kesack. “When Covid-19 started, DraftKings was well ahead of most other companies in the technology space. The company did everything to make sure everyone could stay productive and comfortable. It is well accepted that people had to adjust to this and that online morning meetings could take a bit longer than face to face meet-ups. People are encouraged to take the opportunity to have those water cooler talks after the meeting. It helps keep interpersonal relationships alive while we are working remotely.”
Career development is another strength. “I was aware of DraftKings as a company before I joined but I quickly found it is a software engineering company involved in sport and not the other way around,” says O’Reilly. “When you join, your career path is laid out for you and it’s limitless, well defined and structured. One of the concerns some people have when they start a new job is that they are not going to get the responsibility they want. I knew I would be trusted at DraftKings and encouraged to work to the best of my ability and take on responsibility when I wanted to.”
A key attraction for Conneely was the opportunity to contribute to the company’s culture as well as to build a scalable sports betting platform that was reliable in the cloud. “Those opportunities will keep coming up. We are moving into more and more jurisdictions all the time. No two are the same and we keep learning more. It is reasonable to say that the things we are doing here will shape sports betting for the next 20 years. It was a great opportunity to get.”
According to Kesack, the DraftKings culture is summed up by his experience of crossing the Atlantic to join the Dublin office. “I jumped at the opportunity to move to the Dublin office when it came up. I moved with three small children so that was not the easiest case for DraftKings to do its first international relocation. Nobody blinked at the additional complexity. They just said we will help you get settled, find schools and so on. People from different departments all chipped in to make the move the best experience possible. It’s great to work for a company that cares so fiercely about its people.”
To discover the current openings at DraftKings Dublin, visit careers.draftkings.com