Software Engineering Director

• THE POSITION
• Our roster has an opening with your name on it

Much of what decides whether a fan stays with FanDuel happens either side of the bet: the sign-up that takes a minute, the deposit that clears first time on a Sunday afternoon, the withdrawal that lands when we said it would, and the protections that work quietly in the background for the people who need them.

We are looking for a Software Engineering Director to lead the teams behind that experience across FanDuel’s Customer Product Engineering (CPE) domain.

CPE builds the systems fans touch first and trust most: payments and money movement, account and onboarding, geolocation, responsible gaming and player integrity, and the promotions, rewards and loyalty, campaign orchestration, personalisation and marketing messaging that shape every fan’s day-to-day experience. When CPE works, nobody notices. When it does not, a fan cannot get in, get funded, get paid or get looked after, and quality elsewhere in the product does not make up for it.

The mission: make it quick and predictable for every fan to join, fund an account, get paid and be protected, in every jurisdiction we operate in, on the busiest day of the sporting calendar. Making every moment more, for our customers. Your work always follows our principle Everything Begins with the Customer.

That means designing for extreme, event-driven peak load, where traffic arrives in minutes, and for a heavily regulated environment in which auditability and evidence matter as much as availability. It also means depending on other people’s systems: payment providers, identity and KYC vendors, geolocation suppliers. You build so that their bad day does not become our customers’ bad day.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will lead managers and senior engineers across several teams, set technical direction alongside your Principal and Senior Staff Engineers, make the difficult calls that do not have obvious answers, and create the conditions in which good teams do the best work of their careers. You will work as closely with Product, Compliance, Risk, Finance and Customer Operations as you do with engineers, and you can explain a technical trade-off to an executive audience without diluting it.

You are candid about what is not working and you know when to look for consensus and when the decision is yours, Challenge and Commit. You wear your FanDuel hat first and do not restrict yourself to organisational boundaries, We are One Team. You are a visible part of the domain leadership team and a role model to the wider engineering community, Humble and Hungry.

• THE GAME PLAN
• Everyone on our team has a part to play

Lead multiple engineering teams within CPE, setting a clear technical vision for each area and holding delivery to it.

Own the customer outcomes your teams are accountable for, measured where the fan feels them: registration and verification completion, time to first bet, deposit and withdrawal success rates, payout speed, geolocation pass rates, and the availability of whole journeys rather than the uptime of individual services.

Set the standard for availability and operational excellence in a domain where an outage stops the rest of the product working, including the KPIs, the instrumentation behind them, and the discipline to tell genuine degradation from noise.

Prepare for event-driven peak load so that the biggest days in the sporting calendar are rehearsed, with capacity, failover and degradation behaviour proven in advance.

Reduce the blast radius of third-party failure across payment providers, identity and KYC vendors and geolocation suppliers, using redundancy, graceful degradation and clear fallbacks so that a supplier’s outage does not become a customer’s.

Treat regulation as an engineering requirement, designing for auditability, evidence, data boundaries and jurisdictional variation from the start, and building the relationship with Compliance and Legal that lets us move quickly and safely.

Hold responsible gaming and player integrity to the same product standard as any revenue-generating feature. Fans should be protected by systems that are accurate and timely, and that stay out of the way of people playing well within their means.

Simplify the estate you inherit. Retire duplicated capability, reduce coupling between teams and improve lead time to change, so the domain is easier to work in each quarter than it was the last.

Set the standard for how AI is used across the software lifecycle in your teams, including where we choose not to use it, with evidence of the effect on throughput, quality and security and the judgment to tell real uplift from theatre.

Partner with Product, Compliance, Risk, Finance and Customer Operations to shape the roadmap early, so that capabilities are designed in at inception.

Make sure the right people are in the right jobs through hiring, development, performance management and creating leadership opportunities, and lead with empathy.

Grow the managers and senior engineers who report to you, giving them the context and the scope to make decisions themselves rather than routing them through you.

Make sure the domain is supported properly in production, including on-call and incident response, and that corrective actions are completed rather than logged.

Deliver architecturally sound solutions to complex problems, making considered build-versus-buy decisions and designing for scale, reliability and a multi-year horizon.

Communicate and progress strategic initiatives on a three to five year horizon covering platform evolution, money movement architecture and the shape of the domain.

Be accountable for your budget, spend it carefully, and recognise waste in tooling, infrastructure, vendor services and payment processing costs.

Exemplify our company principles and support a culture of quality, candour and collaboration.

• THE STATS
• What we're looking for in our next teammate

We don’t expect you necessarily to have all of these to apply but they all count.

10+ years in a software role, with 5+ years leading engineering teams. Experience leading other managers.

A track record of delivering and running high-volume transactional systems where correctness, money and customer trust are all at stake, ideally in payments, financial services, identity or another regulated domain.

Experience with highly available, fault-tolerant systems under extreme, event-driven peak load, from design through to production support.

Experience building on third parties at scale, for example payment service providers, KYC and identity vendors or geolocation suppliers, including the operational and commercial realities of those relationships.

Comfortable working in a regulated environment, where auditability, evidence and data boundaries shape the design.

Experience with observability and with using data and KPIs to make engineering decisions and to hold a domain to a measurable standard of availability and performance.

Deep experience in modern back-end languages, functional and object-oriented, including Java, and with cloud infrastructure (preferably AWS), containers and orchestration.

Hands-on understanding of AI-assisted software development, with a considered view of where it belongs in the lifecycle, where it does not, and what a regulated environment allows it to touch.

Experience defining and implementing software delivery practices and agile methods, with evidence of improving delivery pace while maintaining quality.

Experience supporting software systems in production, including on-call, with a sustained focus on improving their stability, availability and performance.

Experience delivering technology solutions with partner development teams through near-shore, off-shore or third-party arrangements.

Experience designing and delivering technology for consumer-facing products in a fast-moving, ambiguous and closely scrutinise