Employee Q&A: Ellen Kim, Lead Software Engineer
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 Ellen, Lead Software Engineer, who’s been with DraftKings for nearly 4 years! Get to know Ellen’s story below.
How have you adjusted your work/life balance for ‘shelter in place’?
The difficulty with ‘shelter in place’ is that there is no boundary between work and home as there is no commute involved. To keep productivity during work hours and to keep me healthy mentally and physically, I’ve been trying to disconnect from work entirely after 6:00 pm and keep myself busy with running, playing golf, and dancing. I’ve started these sports in April, which has helped me a lot to stay positive and healthy during this ‘shelter in place.’
What do you do at DraftKings? How does your team contribute to DraftKings products?
I am a Lead Software Engineer on the Sportsbook Platform team building a multi-jurisdictional sportsbook platform that allows for scalability and configuration for different states.
How did you end up at DraftKings? What drew you to the company?
I applied to DraftKings through the Boston College Career Portal without knowing much about the company, but I liked the orange crown logo. I chose DraftKings based on the common theme I receive when interviewing candidates; it’s the people. After almost 4 years, the intelligent and nice people I work with make working at DraftKings for a long time easy.
What does a typical day look like for you?
My typical day is very similar to any other engineer at DraftKings. I start my day with code review, which is going over implementation details of my peer’s code and catch any critical issues or blockers. Stand up begins at 10:00 am to cover updates and plan what to focus on for that day. I focus on my tickets that entail coding and testing until late afternoon. I occasionally have ad-hoc Zoom meetings with my team to help with any testing or implementation. I also run team chit-chat daily at 4:00 pm with fun topics or games to increase team bonding and morale. I end my day by reviewing our Jira board to review any project progress, preparing release plans, and rearranging tickets on the board depending on blockers and priorities.
Since beginning your career at DraftKings, you’ve been able to work on both platform and product teams. How has this experience influenced your professional and technical growth as an engineer?
I started on the Financial Operations team fresh out of college without having any previous experience in our industry. Because of my great team, I was able to build in-depth domain knowledge in the payments system and learned a variety of debugging skills using DataDog, Elk, and AWS console. I also had many opportunities to integrate with many payment processors, including Paypal, Mazooma, Skrill, and Paysafe, which helped me grow as an Engineer.
Since I moved to the Sportsbook Platform team in January 2020, I’ve been working on a multi-jurisdiction project to support scalable sportsbook platforms, where I had the chance to work on a new initiative for the first time during my DraftKings tenure. I’ve also been trying to solve new problems in our data center and big data cache system, which have helped me build expertise in a variety of technical issues.
Tabs or spaces?
Tabs!
What is your favorite perk at DraftKings? What is your favorite DraftKings company event?
Nail salon and Halloween party because I liked the costume competition.
What’s your proudest DraftKings moment?
My proudest moment is our Sportsbook launch after several months of crunch mode.
What do you prefer to be called? Programmer, Coder, or Engineer?
I prefer Engineer.
What’d you wish you had known before working at DraftKings?
I wish I knew how the NFL season worked before working at Draftkings. I never thought the NFL season could affect my year-long schedule.
