Fanatics Betting and Gaming

Fanatics Betting and Gaming (aka FBG, or BetFanatics) is a well-capitalized new venture, within the broad umbrella of Fanatics as a holding company, that is poised to disrupt the existing sportsbook and casino/iGaming markets. Specifically I lead the Data Platform and Integration teams, and we are just ramping up hiring to build the core foundations of our teams and systems, starting with some of our more senior ICs and 1 additional manager hire (with more future roles to come, including more entry-level and mid-career). We plan to encompass all aspects of an end-to-end data platform, including data lake, data warehousing, analytics and visualization, enterprise reporting, regulatory and privacy compliance, as well as building out personalization (P13N) and other DS/ML platforms (e.g. supporting Risk/Trading functions in-house eventually). We also partner with other teams within Fanatics, collaborating on MarTech and general data activation, and not to mention all the other places where data is needed (Fraud/Trust, Ops, Customer Care, etc.). We don't buy into buzzwords, but we believe in many of the underlying principles and good ideas behind "modern data stack" and "data mesh architecture". Seriously, just try out the existing options like DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, etc., and see for yourself how customer-unfriendly they are, how unwelcoming the first-time user experience is (especially for any total newcomers to sports-betting), how little personalization or customization there is, and how different it is from the kind of frictionless browsing/shopping/consumption experience you'd expect with modern customer-obsessed data-driven products like Audible or Amazon or Netflix or Robinhood (e.g. one analogy: we'd like to make sports-betting as approachable as Robinhood made buying stock). We deeply believe we can do better, and it all starts with data platforms from the ground up. And personally, myself and many others within the company are also deeply passionate about what the industry terms "responsible gaming", i.e. building trust with players/bettors via data-driven features to empower players to make responsible decisions (rather than dark patterns focused on squeezing players, or taking advantage of whales, or enabling addictive behavior). We definitely think we can easily "raise the bar" here, compared to industry norms focusing on meeting the bare minimum legal/regulatory standards. - Tech stack: primarily AWS based, with lots of flexibility in terms of adopting various SaaS offerings (e.g. currently evaluating Snowflake, Databricks, Fivetran, dbt, Tableau, and services like Amplitude, Graphyte, etc.); near-term focus is on building launch-ready MVP data platform, with plans for much more sophisticated features and capabilities over time - Some recent-ish press coverage of Fanatics as a whole: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/06/fanatics-raises-1-5b-at-a-27b-valuation-as-it-evolves-into-a-digital-sports-platform , and of Fanatics Betting and Gaming in particular: https://sportshandle.com/fanatics-planning-sports-wagering-entry Feel free to connect or message me on LinkedIn (referencing this post): https://www.linkedin.com/in/ye-wang-368923a/