Why Sports Create a Different Kind of Technical Challenge

A touchdown changes the game in seconds. The demands on our technology can change just as quickly.

One minute, a service might handle 100 requests per second. The next? It's handling 1,000 requests. Every big play and shift in momentum creates new demands for the engineers who build and maintain our platform.

For Jessie, Director of Engineering, that's what makes the work so interesting. Live sports introduce a level of technical complexity that's difficult to predict.

"Some of our code paths drastically vary in traffic based on the state of the game," Jessie explains. "Those challenges of that variability in the traffic are incredibly interesting technical problems to solve."

When football, basketball, hockey, and baseball overlap in the fall, our systems face some of the year's biggest tests. This season brings another element: it's the first fall that our unified DraftKings Sports and Casino app is available nationwide, bringing more experiences together for customers across the country.

Behind Every Big Play, There's a Team of Engineers

On a typical NFL Sunday, our platform processes billions of customer transactions. Behind that experience are thousands of technologists preparing for those moments across the globe. We have teammates in different countries and time zones, working together to ensure our app runs at its best on game day. 

"The preparation we do is a lot like a real sports team," says Zach Maybury, Chief Technology Officer. "You don't see the work that goes on behind the scenes. It's thousands of hours, countless days, invested in perfecting the technology."

That work includes performance testing, planning for failures, and building resilient systems that continue serving customers even when demand spikes. To keep everything running efficiently, our engineers work across AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Kafka, React, TypeScript, C#, Swift, and Kotlin. 

Working at this scale takes more than technical expertise. It takes engineers who are willing to question existing solutions and find better ways forward.

David, a Senior Manager on our Site Reliability team, says that willingness to embrace change is one of the things he values most. 

"People aren't scared to make changes," David says. "If somebody comes up with a good idea and has the data to back it up, that will generally get approved by leadership."

For Zach, who has experienced ten NFL seasons at DraftKings across different engineering roles - starting as a technical lead to now leading the tech side as our CTO, trusting the team is especially important when the pressure is on.

"It's critically important to give the team the space they need to succeed," he says. "They always figure it out."

Behind every customer interaction is a team of brilliant technologists working to ensure the experience feels seamless. Each new sports season brings another opportunity to push our technology. Sound exciting? See for yourself and explore our open roles.