Employee Q&A: Andy Botelho, Software Engineering Manager
DraftKings couldn’t produce award-winning products without our Engineering team. We’re excited to spotlight our talented engineers through our Q&A series. Please welcome Andy, Software Engineering Manager, who’s been with DraftKings for over 6 years! Get to know Andy’s story below.
What do you do at DraftKings? How does your team contribute to DraftKings’ mission/goals?
I am a Software Engineering Manager for the Account Platform division at DraftKings, specifically managing the “Identity Core” team. Our primary responsibility is user authentication and permissions across all DraftKings apps. More specifically, our team builds and manages the systems that allow DraftKings users to create and log into accounts, along with what drives a user’s permissions at any given time, such as their current geolocation. It can sometimes be difficult to point to a specific feature on our site that we exclusively built since a lot of our work is infrastructural in nature and done behind the scenes. Still, we take pride in our contributions to helping the company rapidly expand into new products and markets.
How did you end up at DraftKings? What drew you to the company?
When I was a senior at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 2014, a couple of my friends from high school told me about these new daily fantasy sports websites, like DraftKings, where you could make money playing fantasy sports — a very appealing concept to us! Surely enough, only a couple of weeks later, I saw DraftKings was going to be at my school’s career fair looking for software engineers, so I made it a point to stop by their booth. I don’t want to say that the free sweatshirt made a difference, but it definitely didn’t hurt. I took a snowy train ride from Worcester to Boston for the onsite interview, and after meeting with several engineers, nearly all of whom are still at the company (one is now the CTO!), I felt like I had come across something special. There wasn’t much to go off in the way of online reviews or past performances since the company was so new, but the clear sense of pride everyone had in their work at DraftKings, along with their genuine enthusiasm for principles of open collaboration and bias for action, was enough to convince me to sign on. Plus, there were more sweatshirts.
How have you adjusted to working from home?
From the beginning, I’ve been impressed by the smoothness with which our teams were able to shift to a remote working environment. With virtually no downtime, we were able to continue work on our projects and preserve the chemistry our teams had developed while working together in person from the years prior. Of course, there were a few kinks and habits to work out with my workstation at home and how to best use tools like Zoom. Still, overall, the adjustment to developing software remotely went surprisingly well. That being said, I do believe the strong foundation of team camaraderie we had already built before the pandemic was instrumental in allowing us to transition to remote work smoothly. Because of that, I look forward to when we can return to the office and resume a work-life that I believe leads to higher levels of engagement and collaboration. Personally, at the onset of the pandemic, I felt strongly that I needed to preserve a semblance of my old routine, so I made sure my formerly cherished 45-minutes of peaceful reading time on the train was maintained with doing so on the couch every morning.
What does a typical day look like for you?
In the hour before our daily team standup, I usually take some time to catch up on any production issues from the previous night (most eventful things happen while sports are on in the evening), do some code reviews, and re-snooze 9 am Slack reminders. The rest of my morning is usually filled with our recurring meetings like project check-ins, Agile ceremonies, and one-on-ones. After lunch, the afternoon is more open for tasks that need longer stretches of uninterrupted time, such as reviewing tech plans, having one-off design discussions, and writing documents about our projects and systems. At least once a week, there will be “Spotlight” or “Chalk Talk” meetings held by some team across the engineering organization, which are always great opportunities to see what other teams are working on. Back when we were in the office, every Friday afternoon, the company had “Snack,” where food was catered, and folks could socialize more easily across teams. In Covid times, our team holds a Zoom meeting every Friday in hopes of replicating Snack. While we aren’t blessed with the free dinners of old, we still manage to get in some friendly banter before kicking off the weekend.
How has DraftKings grown/changed over your 6+ years with the company?
In some ways, we’ve changed a lot, and in others, it’s just like when I joined. When I first started, we had a single monolith server application backing our DFS product. We used to ship code changes to that thing multiple times per day. Today, after having launched multiple new products like Sportsbook and Casino, which are in highly regulated spaces, each team owns and manages several microservices, and depending on the functionality of that service, code changes can only be shipped if a series of regulatory checks and approvals are completed. So in that sense, there are more processes and controls in the way we operate and build software. Yet, even while working remotely today, I still see the same sense of camaraderie and collaboration that drew me to DraftKings in the first place. I frequently still describe us as having a startup atmosphere, and I still find our work to be genuinely fun as we continue to grow, launch new products in new jurisdictions, and prepare for big events like the Super Bowl or March Madness.
What was the transition like for you, pivoting from an individual contributor to a management role?
The transition has been an insightful experience in learning where I need to shift my focus. While living less in the internal technical details of what my individual team is building, I spend more time making sure our integration points with other teams are sound and on track in terms of dependencies and timing. More importantly, rather than focusing primarily on our software and systems' health, I focus more on our team’s health. Understanding each team member’s needs and what best motivates our overall efforts requires an explicit type of thinking and action that I did not frequently undertake as an individual contributor.
What do you prefer to be called? Programmer, Coder, or Engineer?
Sometimes I am reluctant to use “engineer” because what we build isn’t something you can physically see or feel like a bridge or a skyscraper. Still, when it comes down to the principles we use to build complex, distributed systems that operate at scale, I think there are many concepts and ideas that span the disciplines, so in that sense, I like “engineer.” Otherwise, I fall back to “software developer.”
What’s your favorite code editor?
Lately, I’ve been growing fond of Visual Studio Code and its support for developing cross-platform .NET Core applications, among the many other languages it has extensions for.
What is your favorite perk at DraftKings? What is your favorite DraftKings company event?
I’ve always enjoyed our annual company “Summer Bash” parties. There is usually a memorable keynote speaker, such as Jonathon Kraft of the New England Patriots in 2015 and Larry Fitzgerald of the Arizona Cardinals in 2019.
What advice do you have for those seeking a job at DraftKings?
In most cases, strong communication and a positive attitude can go a lot further than flashy technical skills. I remember a college basketball coach in high school gave us a lecture on what he looks for in the players he recruits for his team. He said that most of the time, he’s looking for players who don’t complain to referees, don’t showboat, and treat their teammates well, both on and off the court. Of course, some basketball skill level is needed. Still, a lot of that can be more easily taught with repetition than certain character traits. I think there are many parallels between this recruiting philosophy and how an engineering candidate can succeed not only in an interview but also excel in the role afterward.
What’s your proudest DraftKings moment?
It’s a tie between NFL Week 1 in 2015 and our Sportsbook product launch in 2018. In the lead-up to NFL 2015, we had been tirelessly splitting functionality out of the monolith application mentioned above to meet the traffic we were expecting for Week 1. We were still splitting out critical functionality mere days before Sunday. Going into kickoff, we had a lot of crossed fingers, and when our systems, on the whole, worked well and met the demand, there was a great deal of relief and pride. In 2018, after the Supreme Court paved the way for legal sports betting in New Jersey, all gears shifted towards launching a brand new Sportsbook product there. After a hectic six months of standing up new services and systems, we were able to be the first to market in New Jersey, which felt very gratifying. However, West Virginia was right around the corner, then Pennsylvania, and so on up through today.
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