Build Scalable Systems for Millions of Fans

What started as a job post spotted by Corey’s wife turned into a career-defining leap. Today, Corey is a Lead Software Engineer on our Daily Fantasy backend team, where his work helps enhance the game for millions of sports fans.

“DraftKings has been a great experience for me—it’s a fun engineering culture and I learn something new every day,” Corey said. “It’s exciting to work on a product that people use and enjoy.”

Engineering at Game-Day Scale

Corey’s tech stack includes: C#, ASP.NET Core, ServiceStack, Kubernetes, Typescript, React, AWS, Redis, MassTransit, SQS, and RabbitMQ. This tech ecosystem is optimized for speed, experimentation, and reliability, especially when sports fans flood the app during big moments.

One of the team’s biggest technical puzzles? Managing "spiky" traffic during high-stakes sporting events. “The tech stack is a nice balance of performance, cost, and battle-tested reliability,” Corey said. “We have a lot of freedom to try new technologies and adopt what works best for us on individual projects.”

To tackle those spikes, the team gets incredibly strategic:

• Distributed microservices and layered caching
• Smart indexing and read replication
• Kubernetes autoscaling
• Load testing to simulate game-day surges
• Live dashboards to stay responsive in real-time

“We have some very interesting technical challenges to face and unusual scale problems to solve in engineering,” Corey said. “Not every company has products that make millions of people check the app all at the same time when one player scores a touchdown or scores a basket!” 

An Evolving Approach to AI

Corey admits he was skeptical about AI at first. But the hands-on experience changed his mind.

“Learning to get the most out of this technology is going to take time, and it’s far from magic, but there is huge value here and it’s only going to get more powerful,” he said. “I’m glad DraftKings has embraced the technology and encourages engineers to adopt it.”

Leading With Impact

Thanks to his leadership and mentoring mindset, Corey was promoted to a lead role after just one year. Today, he helps plan and guide large-scale initiatives while serving as a domain expert on key systems.

“We have a strong engineering culture with frequent internal presentations to share knowledge across teams,” Corey explained. “A lot of learning at DraftKings is ‘learning by doing’ – we move fast, and release frequently, so we tend to get experience in a wide range of technologies just in the course of our day-to-day.”

And if you’re thinking about applying?

“Come prepared to work hard and learn a lot, and you will find a company that values your time and your skillset,” Corey said. Ready to bring your tech career to the next level? Check out our open roles.