Employee Q&A: Matt Welch, Principal Software Engineer — Daily Fantasy Sports
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 Matt, Principal Software Engineer, who’s been with DraftKings for over 5 years! Get to know Matt’s story below.
How have you adjusted your work/life balance for ‘shelter in place’?
Thankfully, in my case, it was an easy transition. Commuting to the Boston office takes me a little over an hour each way, so getting more than two hours of my day back has been huge. I’ve been able to spend a lot more time with my family, help around the house more, and actually keep up with the yard work for a change. We moved into a new house last fall, and I have a dedicated office where I can close the door and focus on work. I could get used to this!
What do you do at DraftKings? How does your team contribute to DraftKings products?
For several years, I was the team lead for one of the backend engineering teams. We owned the Daily Fantasy Sports contest entry system, the contest lobby, league lobbies, missions, and more. Now, I serve as the Principal Software Engineer (Backend) for the Daily Fantasy Sports product vertical. My team is currently working on an unannounced project that we expect to launch for the upcoming NFL season.
How did you end up at DraftKings? What drew you to the company?
I’ve always been a big sports fan and had considered fantasy sports as an industry I would enjoy early in my career. When DraftKings reached out in early 2015, it seemed like a great fit. I had just spent a year and a half learning C#, coincidentally using the same framework DraftKings had chosen to start their microservice journey.
DraftKings is approaching 5 years since the initial effort to move to a Service Oriented Architecture. What is one thing you know now that you wish you knew 5 years ago?
I’m reminded of the expression, “if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.” For several years there, it felt like “write a new microservice” was our solution to every problem… but there were many problems that probably could have been better solved with other technologies or solutions. I’m glad to see us embracing so many new technologies and approaches today.
What does a typical day look like for you?
Most days are a healthy mix of design discussions and meetings, analyzing the performance of our existing codebase and looking for ways to improve it, researching & prototyping in new technologies, and root cause analyses/issue investigations. The days that I can skew as heavily as possible toward those last three (performance, new technologies, and investigations) tend to be the days I enjoy the most.
What do you prefer to be called? Programmer, Coder, or Engineer?
I’ve always been rather fond of the term “code monkey”, popularized by the 2006 Jonathan Coulton song — but now that I go back and give it a listen, I think the picture it paints is in sharp contrast to one of my favorite things about DraftKings. I firmly believe that developers take more pride and ownership in the code that they’ve written if they got to participate in designing the system. Our interview process is set up to help us identify candidates who will contribute to design discussions in a meaningful way. I think we end up with a better product and a more engaged engineering department as a result. So all of that to say — engineer… definitely.
Speaking of the interview process, what advice do you have for getting a job at DraftKings?
Be relentlessly curious. Don’t just do things because that’s how you were told to do them… understand the why… and be able to explain it. Understand how the parts you worked on fit into the whole. Be passionate. If your school projects, internships, or current position didn’t give you the opportunity to work on something you care about, find an open-source project that you believe in, clone the repo and start contributing. Real-world experience is invaluable, and the more passionate you are about the project, the more you will learn from it.
What is your favorite perk at DraftKings? What is your favorite DraftKings company event?
As a lifelong Patriots fan, I think our partnership with the Patriots has provided us with some of my favorite perks, from games & concerts in the DraftKings box at Gillette Stadium, to film sessions with coaches to walking around on the field.
My favorite company event is probably the 5-year anniversary party held at the Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel in 2017. It was a significant milestone to celebrate — and when I think about all the things we’ve accomplished since, I hope we take the time to celebrate again soon.
What’s your proudest DraftKings moment?
Seeing users excitedly tweeting about new features I helped deliver always feels great. Still, I think my proudest accomplishments had mostly gone unnoticed by users — like when I rewrote the backend process that recalculated league leaderboards and improved its runtime from over 3 hours to just under 3 minutes. Or when I doubled the theoretical maximum throughput of our contest entry system to more than 10x our all-time peak entries per minute. Knowing that we have that much headroom before we have to do significant work on that part of the system feels great.
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