How to Apply to DraftKings

12 min read Last updated April 20, 2026 170 open positions
Blake Crosley
Blake Crosley Researched using publicly available information, hiring data, and ATS analysis.

Key Takeaways

  • DraftKings runs its entire hiring process on Workday at draftkings.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/DraftKings — the careers.draftkings.com marketing site redirects into it.
  • The company employs over 4,000 people across Boston (HQ), Hoboken, Plovdiv (Bulgaria), Dublin, Las Vegas, and smaller hubs, with meaningful engineering depth in Plovdiv that shapes coordination patterns for US roles.
  • Interview loops are longer and more rigorous than the consumer brand suggests: five to six rounds for senior engineering, with real coding bar, real system-design bar, and structured values-based behavioral screening.
  • Every role touching wagering systems requires a state-issued gaming license, which adds four to twelve weeks between offer and full production access — plan start dates accordingly.
  • Compensation is competitive for Boston and Hoboken but is not FAANG-tier; equity is granted in DKNG stock, which has been volatile, and total compensation upside depends on execution against a still-maturing profitability story.
  • Regulatory risk, competitive pressure from ESPN Bet, and a visible cost-discipline pivot are the three headwinds any candidate should understand and be prepared to discuss honestly in interviews.

About DraftKings

DraftKings Inc. (NASDAQ: DKNG) is the dominant force in American legal sports wagering, a company that rode the 2018 Supreme Court ruling striking down PASPA from a Boston daily fantasy upstart into a vertically-integrated gaming operator with roughly $5 billion in annual revenue and more than 4,000 employees. Co-founded in 2012 by Jason Robins (still CEO), Matt Kalish, and Paul Liberman out of a Vistaprint conference room, DraftKings went public in April 2020 through a three-way SPAC merger with Diamond Eagle Acquisition Corp and SBTech, arriving on the Nasdaq as a roughly $3 billion company at the exact moment live sports were shut down by the pandemic. What followed was one of the most aggressive state-by-state expansion campaigns in modern gaming history: legal mobile sports betting now operates in roughly half of US states, and DraftKings sits at or near the top of market share in nearly every one it enters. The company runs four primary business lines. Sportsbook, the flagship, takes regulated wagers on professional and collegiate sports in jurisdictions where DraftKings holds a license. iGaming offers regulated online casino games (slots, table games, live dealer) in the much smaller subset of states where that activity is legal — currently Connecticut, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, West Virginia, and a handful of others. Daily Fantasy Sports, the original product, remains a meaningful contributor and an important acquisition channel feeding paid wagering. The fourth leg is Jackpocket, the digital lottery courier app DraftKings acquired in 2024 for approximately $750 million, which lets users buy state lottery tickets through their phone and has become central to the company's strategy for reaching customers in states where sports betting remains illegal. DraftKings also operates a media arm, DK Network, and a growing B2B technology business built on top of the SBTech platform. The corporate footprint is deliberately distributed. Headquarters remain in Boston's Back Bay, but substantial engineering and product centers exist in Hoboken, New Jersey; Plovdiv, Bulgaria (inherited from SBTech and still the backbone of the wagering platform); Dublin, Ireland; and Las Vegas, alongside smaller offices in New York, Tel Aviv, and London. Hybrid work policies vary by team and role, with most engineering roles requiring two to three days per week in a hub office. The Bulgarian operation is particularly important context for anyone considering a US engineering role: a large portion of the core sportsbook platform ships out of Plovdiv, and US teams coordinate across a six-to-seven hour time difference. The honest business picture in 2026 is one of scale achieved but profitability still being proven. DraftKings posted its first full-quarter of adjusted EBITDA profitability in 2023 and has continued to guide toward expanding positive EBITDA, but GAAP net income remains inconsistent and the company burns meaningful cash on marketing, state launches, and technology. Three structural pressures deserve weight in any career decision. First, regulatory risk is constant: individual states can and do change tax rates (Illinois raised its effective sports wagering tax materially in 2024), and the NCAA has pushed successfully for restrictions on player-prop betting on collegiate athletes in several jurisdictions, directly compressing handle on a profitable product line. Second, competition intensified sharply when Disney-owned ESPN Bet (operated by Penn Entertainment) launched in late 2023, and while early results have been modest, the brand partnership forced DraftKings and FanDuel into a more disciplined promotional posture. Third, the leadership has visibly pivoted from growth-at-all-cost to cost discipline, including headcount freezes, selective layoffs, and tighter scrutiny of internal projects. These are not reasons to avoid DraftKings — the company remains one of the best-capitalized consumer tech employers in the Northeast — but they are reasons to enter with clear expectations rather than a 2021 hiring-boom mental model.

Application Process

  1. 1
    Start at careers

    Start at careers.draftkings.com, which is the marketing-layer careers site running behind Cloudflare. All open requisitions redirect to DraftKings' Workday tenant at draftkings.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/DraftKings. Search and filter there for the most complete view of open roles.

  2. 2
    Create a Workday candidate profile using an email address you check daily

    Create a Workday candidate profile using an email address you check daily. Workday sends most scheduling and status communication from automated addresses, and messages occasionally land in Promotions or spam folders. Use a clean, professional email and verify it before applying.

  3. 3
    Upload a resume formatted for ATS parsing: single column, no text boxes, no head

    Upload a resume formatted for ATS parsing: single column, no text boxes, no headers or footers containing contact info, standard section labels (Experience, Education, Skills), and a .docx or text-layer PDF. Workday's parser will pre-fill experience fields from your resume. Review every parsed field — mistakes in dates, titles, or employers are common and can disqualify you from keyword matches downstream.

  4. 4
    Answer the voluntary disclosure questions honestly but strategically

    Answer the voluntary disclosure questions honestly but strategically. DraftKings uses Workday's standard EEO, veteran, and disability self-identification blocks. These do not factor into hiring decisions, but gaming license questions (prior felony convictions, problem-gambling exposure, regulatory history) absolutely do — answer these truthfully because every US jurisdiction requires licensing background checks for employees in wagering-adjacent roles.

  5. 5
    Tailor your cover letter or summary to the specific business line

    Tailor your cover letter or summary to the specific business line. A Sportsbook trading role, an iGaming slots product role, a Jackpocket growth role, and a DK Network content role are evaluated by entirely different hiring teams with distinct priorities. Name the product and reference a recent, verifiable public development — a state launch, a feature release, an earnings-call data point.

  6. 6
    Submit the application and expect an initial recruiter screen within seven to fo

    Submit the application and expect an initial recruiter screen within seven to fourteen business days for active requisitions. If you have not heard back in three weeks for a role still posted, the role may be on hold or you may not have passed resume screen — follow up once with the recruiter listed on LinkedIn, then move on.

  7. 7
    A typical recruiter screen lasts 30 minutes and covers your motivation, compensa

    A typical recruiter screen lasts 30 minutes and covers your motivation, compensation expectations, work authorization, location flexibility, and one or two behavioral prompts. Have a clean answer ready for: 'Why DraftKings specifically, versus FanDuel or BetMGM?' Do not bluff enthusiasm for gambling if you do not feel it — the recruiter will hear it. It is acceptable, and often preferable, to frame your interest around the technical challenge, the regulated-industry complexity, or the data-and-trading depth.

  8. 8
    After the recruiter screen, expect a hiring-manager conversation, then a technic

    After the recruiter screen, expect a hiring-manager conversation, then a technical or craft-specific round, then an onsite or virtual-onsite loop of three to five interviews. Engineering loops typically include a coding interview, a system-design interview, a domain-depth conversation, and a values-and-behavior round. Total elapsed time from application to offer runs four to eight weeks for most roles, with executive searches taking longer.

  9. 9
    Offers arrive verbally from the recruiter first, followed by a written offer in

    Offers arrive verbally from the recruiter first, followed by a written offer in Workday. Base salary, target bonus percentage, RSU grant (typical for L4 and above), and sign-on bonus are all separately negotiable. DraftKings pays competitively for Boston and Hoboken but is not a FAANG-tier compensation house — equity upside is tied to DKNG stock performance, which has been volatile.

  10. 10
    Accepting the offer triggers a background check and, for licensable roles, a gam

    Accepting the offer triggers a background check and, for licensable roles, a gaming-license application. The license process is run through the state regulator of wherever you will be working and can take four to twelve weeks. You can usually start in a non-licensed capacity during the interim, but full access to wagering systems and production data is gated on license approval. Plan your start date accordingly, and disclose anything in your history that could surface — surprises at this stage are how offers get rescinded.

Resume Tips for DraftKings

recommended

Lead with measurable outcomes tied to systems that look like DraftKings' stack

Lead with measurable outcomes tied to systems that look like DraftKings' stack. For engineering, that means Kotlin or Java backend services, Go microservices, React or React Native front ends, Kafka or similar event streaming, AWS as the primary cloud, and PostgreSQL or similar relational stores. Name the technologies, not just 'backend development.'

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Quantify scale wherever possible

Quantify scale wherever possible. DraftKings operates a platform that handles peak NFL-Sunday traffic spikes measured in millions of concurrent users and tens of thousands of wagers per second. Résumés that demonstrate comfort with high-throughput, low-latency systems — even at a smaller absolute scale — move through screens faster. 'Reduced p99 latency from 340ms to 110ms under 50k RPS' beats 'improved performance.'

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For non-engineering roles, mirror the specific vocabulary of the regulated gamin

For non-engineering roles, mirror the specific vocabulary of the regulated gaming industry. Terms like 'handle,' 'hold,' 'GGR,' 'NGR,' 'cohort LTV,' 'responsible gaming,' 'KYC,' 'AML,' 'licensed jurisdiction,' and 'promotional credit' signal that you understand the business context without needing remedial explanation. If you have actual regulated industry experience — banking, insurance, pharmaceuticals, healthcare — lean into that parallel.

recommended

Include a skills section with explicit tool names because Workday's parser build

Include a skills section with explicit tool names because Workday's parser builds a searchable tag set from it. For a senior engineer, that means listing the languages, frameworks, cloud services, observability tools, and CI systems you have actually used. Do not pad with tools you have seen in a demo once — DraftKings interviewers probe depth and will catch it.

recommended

If you have sports-industry, fantasy, betting, or gaming experience, surface it

If you have sports-industry, fantasy, betting, or gaming experience, surface it near the top of the résumé even if it was a side project. A personal model for NFL player-prop pricing, a fantasy-baseball tool you built, or a background as a licensed trader at another book is genuine signal. If you do not have that background, do not fake it — pivot to adjacent regulated-domain credibility instead.

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For trading and risk roles, your résumé should read like a quantitative finance

For trading and risk roles, your résumé should read like a quantitative finance résumé. Include programming competence (Python plus SQL minimum, R or KDB a plus), statistical modeling, experience with live pricing systems, and any exposure to market-making, options trading, or sports modeling. Masters-level coursework in statistics, econometrics, or operations research is a meaningful credential for these teams.

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For product management and product-design roles, emphasize experience with regul

For product management and product-design roles, emphasize experience with regulated consumer products, compliance-constrained feature work, A/B testing at scale, and cross-functional coordination with legal and compliance teams. Product managers at DraftKings cannot ship features without regulatory sign-off in every affected state — candidates who treat legal as a partner rather than a blocker stand out.

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For marketing, creative, and brand roles, demonstrate work that cleared legal re

For marketing, creative, and brand roles, demonstrate work that cleared legal review in a regulated category — alcohol, pharmaceuticals, financial services, tobacco, or gambling. Portfolios of edgy unregulated direct-to-consumer work tend to misfire in screening. Cite specific campaigns, their compliance frame, and the measured outcome.

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Keep the résumé to one page if you have fewer than ten years of experience, two

Keep the résumé to one page if you have fewer than ten years of experience, two pages if more. DraftKings recruiters triage large volumes of applicants and sparse, high-signal résumés convert at a higher rate than dense ones. Strip the objective statement, the 'references available on request' line, and any graphical elements that break Workday's parser.

recommended

Save the file as 'Firstname-Lastname-Resume-2026

Save the file as 'Firstname-Lastname-Resume-2026.pdf' with a text layer, not an image-scanned PDF. Scanned PDFs parse to gibberish and will be filtered out before a human sees them. If you are not sure whether your PDF has a selectable text layer, open it and try to copy a sentence — if the copy works cleanly, the parser will read it.

ATS System: Workday

DraftKings runs the full Workday Recruiting suite at draftkings.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/DraftKings. Workday is an enterprise-grade human-capital-management platform used by most Fortune 500 companies; at DraftKings it handles job posting, candidate profiles, resume parsing, interview scheduling, offer generation, and onboarding. The careers.draftkings.com marketing site sits in front of it as a Cloudflare-protected content layer, but every actual apply flow drops into the Workday tenant. Candidates who have applied to any other Workday-powered employer will recognize the profile structure, and your account history within one employer's Workday does not carry over to another — each tenant is isolated.

  • Use standardized section headings in your résumé: 'Work Experience,' 'Education,' 'Skills,' 'Certifications.' Workday's parser looks for exactly these anchor strings to segment your résumé into structured fields. Creative headings like 'Where I've Made an Impact' break the parser and push parsed content into the wrong buckets.
  • Match keywords from the job description using the employer's exact phrasing. If the requisition says 'Kotlin,' do not write 'JVM languages.' If it says 'regulatory compliance,' do not write 'policy adherence.' Workday scores keyword overlap literally, and synonyms do not count.
  • Always review the parsed experience entries before clicking Submit. Workday often mis-parses date ranges ('Jun 2022 - Present' sometimes becomes two separate jobs), merges concurrent roles, or drops the most recent position entirely. A five-minute manual correction at this step materially raises your odds.
  • Upload your résumé as a .docx or text-layer .pdf. Workday parses both, but .docx tends to produce cleaner structured fields because it preserves heading styles natively. If you have the choice, use .docx.
  • Complete your candidate profile fully, even sections Workday marks as optional. DraftKings recruiters can filter the candidate pool by fields like 'willing to relocate,' 'work authorization,' and 'years of experience.' Missing fields make you invisible to those filters.
  • Set your email notification preferences to receive all status updates. Workday status changes ('Under Review,' 'Interview Scheduled,' 'No Longer Under Consideration') are the cleanest signal of where you stand. Recruiters do not always send separate updates.
  • Do not apply to more than three open requisitions at DraftKings simultaneously. Recruiters see the full application history for a candidate, and scattergun applying signals a lack of focus. Pick the two or three roles that best match your background and invest the effort to tailor each.

Interview Culture

DraftKings interview loops are structured, competency-driven, and noticeably more rigorous than the company's consumer-facing brand suggests.

Engineering loops for senior roles run five to six total rounds: a recruiter screen, a hiring-manager conversation, a coding interview (one to two LeetCode-style problems at medium difficulty, typically on CoderPad with live editing), a system-design interview scaled to the candidate's level, a domain-depth or behavioral round, and a values-and-culture conversation with a cross-functional partner. The coding bar is real — candidates should be able to talk through time and space complexity, identify at least one alternative approach, and write compiling code in a language of their choice without syntax struggling. System-design interviews lean heavily on high-throughput, low-latency consumer-facing scenarios: design a live-odds update system, design a wager-placement pipeline that survives a 10x traffic spike at the opening NFL kickoff, design a real-time leaderboard for a major contest. Candidates who reach for distributed-systems fundamentals — partitioning, replication, consistency models, back-pressure, idempotency — perform better than candidates who reach for trendy architectures. Behavioral interviews at DraftKings are built around the company's stated values (talent, trust, teamwork, drive, urgency, and fun, in various formulations across the org). Expect at least one 'tell me about a time' prompt per round, with follow-ups that push into specifics: what was the exact metric, who disagreed with you, what did you do when it did not work. STAR-method answers are expected; vague, feelings-oriented answers are penalized. A recurring theme across multiple candidate reports is that DraftKings prizes urgency and bias toward action — interviewers want to see that you shipped things, made decisions under uncertainty, and recovered from failure publicly rather than privately. For trading, risk, and quantitative roles, expect a more technical and less behavioral loop: a statistics and probability interview (conditional probability, distributions, expected value questions framed around sports scenarios), a modeling interview where you whiteboard how you would price a given market, a coding interview in Python, and a trading-floor simulation where an experienced trader walks you through a live scenario. The bar in trading is substantially higher than engineering in raw quantitative ability, and the team hires heavily from quant finance, professional sports betting, and top-tier statistics programs. Product and design interviews include portfolio reviews, structured product-sense questions ('how would you improve the same-game parlay builder'), and a cross-functional collaboration round. Marketing and brand roles typically include a written or verbal case study where the candidate presents a regulated-industry campaign concept to a panel including legal and compliance partners. Compliance and legal roles involve deep domain conversations about state-by-state regulatory frameworks, responsible-gaming program design, and AML/KYC operational experience. Communication throughout the process is generally prompt by industry standards — most candidates report hearing back within one to two business days between rounds — but follow-through is uneven across business lines. If you go silent for more than ten business days, it is reasonable to send one polite follow-up to the recruiter. Feedback on rejection is rarely substantive; assume it will not be and do not chase it.

What DraftKings Looks For

  • Technical depth in the specific stack, not breadth across many unrelated technologies. Engineers who know Kotlin and JVM tuning deeply, or Go and distributed-systems patterns deeply, or React and front-end performance deeply, convert better than generalists who list fifteen languages.
  • Comfort with regulated-industry constraints. Every product decision at DraftKings is bounded by state law, license conditions, and responsible-gaming obligations. Candidates who treat compliance as part of the problem rather than an obstacle to work around are consistently preferred.
  • Bias toward shipping and urgency. The company runs on state-launch deadlines, major sporting-event calendars, and competitor-driven promotional windows. Leadership consistently rewards teams that ship working software on the calendar over teams that ship perfect software on their own schedule.
  • Quantitative literacy, even in non-quantitative roles. Product managers, marketers, and operations leaders are expected to read cohort analyses, A/B test readouts, and unit-economics dashboards without a hand-holding explanation. Comfort with SQL for self-serve analysis is a genuine differentiator in non-engineering roles.
  • Cross-functional collaboration fluency. Nothing at DraftKings ships without coordination across product, engineering, trading, compliance, legal, and marketing. Candidates who tell crisp stories about driving outcomes across functional boundaries — and naming the specific partners they worked with — outperform candidates who describe siloed individual contributions.
  • Ownership and end-to-end accountability. The company explicitly resists the consulting-style 'I recommended, they decided' framing. Interviewers probe for cases where the candidate owned a problem from diagnosis through implementation through measured outcome. Vague attributions of credit to 'the team' tend to produce follow-up questions that expose the gap.
  • Cultural fit with a sports-and-gaming environment. This does not mean you need to be a sports fan, but it does mean the casual office culture, the internal contests, and the relentless calendar around major sporting events are part of the fabric. Candidates who signal open skepticism about the gambling industry itself tend to self-select out during the behavioral rounds, which is fine for both sides.
  • Integrity around licensing and background history. Because every licensable role requires a state-regulator background check, any discrepancy between what you disclose to DraftKings and what the regulator finds will kill the offer. Recruiters ask upfront about anything that might surface; honest disclosure of prior issues rarely disqualifies, but concealment always does.

Frequently Asked Questions

What ATS does DraftKings use to process applications?
DraftKings uses Workday Recruiting, hosted at draftkings.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/DraftKings. The careers.draftkings.com site is the marketing front end, but every apply button routes into the Workday tenant where the actual profile, resume parsing, interview scheduling, and offer generation happens.
Does DraftKings hire remote workers?
A minority of roles are fully remote, but most positions are hybrid and tied to one of the hub offices — Boston, Hoboken, Las Vegas, Dublin, or Plovdiv. The specific expectation is listed in each requisition. Engineering roles typically require two to three days per week on site. Fully remote arrangements are more common in specialized individual-contributor roles and senior leadership than in early-career roles.
How long does the interview process take end to end?
Four to eight weeks is typical for most roles, from initial recruiter screen to written offer. Executive and specialized trading roles can take longer. Candidates who are available for tight scheduling and flexible on interview windows move through faster. The longest blocker is usually coordinating the final panel, not any individual round.
Do I need a gaming license to work at DraftKings?
Most roles that touch wagering systems, customer funds, or regulatory filings require a license issued by the state regulator where you work. The application is handled by DraftKings' licensing team after you accept the offer, takes four to twelve weeks, and involves fingerprinting, credit and criminal-history review, and occasionally an in-person interview. You can often start in a limited capacity during the process. Non-licensable roles (some marketing, corporate functions, non-wagering engineering) do not require it.
What languages and frameworks does DraftKings' engineering organization use?
The core sportsbook platform is heavily Kotlin and Java on the JVM, with Go used for newer microservices, React for web front ends, React Native and Swift/Kotlin for mobile, Kafka for event streaming, PostgreSQL as the primary relational store, and AWS as the primary cloud. Data and ML teams use Python, Airflow, Databricks, and a mix of Redshift and Snowflake. Exact stacks vary by business line and team.
How should I frame my interest if I don't personally gamble?
Frame it around the technical and business challenge rather than enthusiasm for the product. DraftKings operates one of the highest-traffic real-time consumer systems in the country, inside one of the most heavily regulated industries, at a scale and complexity that few other companies match. Interest in distributed systems, real-time pricing, regulatory engineering, or consumer growth at scale are all legitimate motivations. Do not pretend to be a sports fan or gambler if you are not — interviewers hear through it quickly.
What is the pay like, honestly, in Boston and Hoboken?
Senior engineers (L4 equivalent) typically land in a total-compensation range that is competitive with other Boston and New York-area public tech companies but below FAANG and top-tier quant firms. Base salary is market for the metro, target bonus is meaningful, and RSU grants are real but denominated in DKNG shares, which have traded in a wide band since 2020. Trading roles pay materially more in base and bonus than equivalent-level engineering roles. Early-career roles are paid fairly for the market but without the signing-bonus excess of peak 2021.
Is the ESPN Bet launch hurting DraftKings' hiring?
It has produced a visibly more disciplined hiring posture, yes. DraftKings went through selective layoffs and hiring freezes in 2024 and has continued to run tighter headcount plans than during the 2021-2022 growth phase. Open requisitions still exist in meaningful numbers, but the bar has risen and the volume is lower. For candidates, this means tailoring applications carefully and accepting that less-targeted applications convert poorly.
What's the dress code and office culture?
Casual and sports-forward. Jeans, sneakers, and DraftKings-branded apparel are the norm. Offices have game-day energy during major sporting events, with internal viewing parties, pools, and contests running throughout the calendar. Leadership communication tends to be direct and informal. The culture is open about gambling in a way that can feel jarring to candidates from adjacent industries — if that seems like a poor fit, it probably is.
Does DraftKings sponsor work visas?
The company sponsors H-1B transfers and green-card processes for select senior and specialized roles, particularly in engineering and quantitative functions. They generally do not sponsor initial H-1B lottery cases for early-career positions. The requisition itself will indicate sponsorship availability, and the recruiter screen will confirm it. Work-authorization questions are asked early to avoid wasting anyone's time.

Open Positions

DraftKings currently has 170 open positions.

Check Your Resume Before Applying → View 170 open positions at DraftKings

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Sources

  1. DraftKings Careers —
  2. DraftKings Workday Careers Portal —
  3. DraftKings Investor Relations —
  4. DraftKings Inc. (DKNG) on Nasdaq —
  5. DraftKings Acquires Jackpocket (Press Release) —
  6. Workday Recruiting Product Overview —
  7. NCAA Statement on Sports Betting and Player Prop Wagers —
  8. ESPN Bet Launch Announcement (Penn Entertainment) —