Meet Oleksii, Senior Software Engineer

At DraftKings, we wouldn’t be able to produce award-winning products without our Engineering team. We are incredibly excited to spotlight our talented Engineers through our Q&A series. Today, we talk to Oleksii, Senior Software Engineer, from our Kyiv office.

What do you do at DraftKings? How does your team contribute to DraftKings?

I'm a Senior Backend Developer in the Sports Data Unit, one of the company's core units. The teams here are responsible for streaming large amounts of data: information about sports events, their translations, betting odds, and so on. My team deals with streaming the odds, which is essentially the crux of what betting is. We own several high-load services that many applications consume within the company.

What does a typical day look like for you?

We practice agile development with daily sync-ups and two-week sprints. We don't simply report our status during the dailies but also share and discuss our code from the day before, making future code merges much easier. The dailies start rather late - around 11 AM - so I usually have time to go to the gym or go for a walk in the morning. Then there is the typical day of a programmer: coding, maintaining the services, reviewing codes from teammates, discussing design decisions. We work mostly from home now, but sometimes we go into the office to have design meetings or meet the teammates and have lunch together. 

How do you stay up to date with the newest technologies?

Both the company's architects and my teammates are open to new technologies; the teams are often given liberal choices of what to use in their projects. It's not that we can re-write our services in Rust - though who knows, maybe at some point we will - but within the .NET ecosystem, we tend to stay with the latest and greatest tech. On my team, we can find improvements and refactorings into the delivery schedule quite quickly, and we welcome new ideas if they make us more efficient. We also have many internal tools in our unit where we are free to be creative. These can be good pet projects to try new stuff.

What is your favorite code editor?

My favorite is JetBrains Rider. We've been doing a lot of F# development - several of our core services are written in F#. A few years back, it was much better than Visual Studio regarding the F# support.

What's your proudest DraftKings moment?

My current proudest moment is the performance of our team's components at the 2021 SuperBowl, which is among the top sports events in the US. Not long before that, we had introduced a new complex component and put a big effort into making it both efficient and easy to service. We had clear metrics, a fast and clean code, and the ability to dump and replay any calculation result. I was extremely proud of the team's work when the service perfectly stood the battle-test of the SuperBowl.

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