DraftKings

DraftKings gives lots of opportunities for engineers to take on large challenges, in both technical planning and implementation. This is ideal for early-career growth. The promotion process from software engineer to senior software engineer is straightforward and happens relatively quickly for talented engineers.

The people you work with day-to-day are talented and kind, and collaboration between teams is pretty good as well.

Unlimited PTO is easy to take with no formal approval process.

DraftKings makes an effort to move engineers to different teams when their products become de-prioritized, instead of doing layoffs (although there have been some layoffs, they were certainly less than the ones at other tech companies in recent years).

You're given the opportunity to gain valuable skills, but your compensation will not rise accordingly. Base pay does not really change beyond promotions, with yearly raises being <2%, which will not keep up with inflation.

You are expected to be on call for week-long 24/7 shifts fairly regularly and respond within 10 minutes to any pages, which I found to be a pretty big detriment to my personal life (all without additional compensation).

Expect to do live monitoring on weekends and evenings for big sports events, also unpaid. Once you have experience, it's pretty easy to find a better-paying job with fewer on-call expectations outside of DraftKings.

Product sets deadlines before technical planning is done, meaning engineers are frequently having to step up and be 'heroes' to get features out in time. This leads to a lot of tech debt and production bugs, which further worsens on-call for engineers.

DraftKings is increasingly shifting to metrics to measure engineer success, meaning the number of 'points' of tickets you do will be compared against your peers. Managers do not take into account whether you were on vacation or your contributions towards helping your teammates get their tickets across the board.

Can be a bit of a boy's club. My immediate team was always welcoming, but women engineers who have to collaborate with other teams are often patronized or dismissed. Expect to repeat yourself a few times if you're a woman who has to talk to one of the all-male engineering teams.

Senior management seems lacking. Mostly, they seem to ignore employee feedback and always show up right before product launches to demand changes that should have been suggested much earlier in the planning process (demanding that features previously agreed to be non-MVP get added last minute, pre-launch, changing the product name/color scheme).

Listen to engineer feedback about product collaboration and on-call pain points.