Fanatics Betting and Gaming

Fanatics Betting and Gaming (aka FBG or BetFanatics) is a well-capitalized new venture (i.e. our hiring and growth plans are largely unaffected by recent market turmoil and macro factors), 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 & Analytics engineering function, and we are just ramping up hiring to build the core foundations of our teams and systems, starting with Senior, Staff, and Sr. Staff-level roles (along with future openings for additional engineering managers). 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 ML platforms (which we anticipate being a unique competitive advantage, vs incumbents who barely personalize any part of their product). We also partner with other teams within Fanatics, collaborating on MarTech, customer segmentation, and data activation mechanisms. Personally, I joined after 8 happy years at Audible (an Amazon subsidiary) where I was most recently leading the Data Platform and Data Capture/MarTech teams, and just judging from my long tenure, you can tell it took a strong confluence of factors to convince me to take this calculated and exciting gamble (sorry, pun intended). I believe strongly that we have the right leadership team, the right blend of technology and domain expertise, the right strategy (including dictating asymmetric battles that competitors are inherently unable to match), and an unusually high degree of financial upside potential (without the risks of being a totally new startup, given that we can leverage the strength of Fanatics). 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), 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/Amazon or Netflix or Robinhood (e.g. we'd like to make sports-betting as easy/approachable as Robinhood made buying a stock). And personally, myself and many others within the company are also deeply passionate about what the industry would call "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 Databricks, Snowflake, 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: Feel free to connect or message me on LinkedIn (referencing this post):