Satellite office: how tech hubs across Europe support the industry's leading online operators

Tech hubs are cropping up throughout Europe as startups, entrepreneurs and tech giants are choosing to establish their bases in cities where innovation, co-working spaces and IT centres are flourishing. For online gambling operators, this provides the perfect breeding ground for top engineering, product and developer talent pools to tap into.

Here, we speak to the hub leaders at DraftKings, LeoVegas Group, Bally’s Interactive, Kaizen Gaming and Betsson Group to find out which cities are best placed to cater for their tech needs. 

DraftKings, Bulgaria

Launch: 2010 and 2011

Tech hubs: Plovdiv and Sofia 

VP of engineering: Zach Maybury

During a video showcasing what it’s like to work at DraftKings in Bulgaria, the team can be seen winding down with a game of table football, discussing strategies in a meeting room with cups sporting the company’s distinctive crown logo visible across the table, and huddled around a laptop exchanging ideas. Staff are able to make use of the open areas to socialise, grab a snack from the kitchen, enjoy the lounge areas, and savour the barista services.

Having a large presence in Bulgaria with two tech hubs – one in the capital, Sofia, which boasts a population of 1.2 million, and the other in the country’s second-largest city, Plovdiv – DraftKings employs a team of nearly 1,000 across both offices, with around 90% of its workforce hailing from backgrounds in engineering, IT and product development. The two former SBTech locations became part of the DraftKings family through a three-way combination with Diamond Eagle Acquisition Corp in April 2020 via a SPAC merger.

One of the reasons for setting up tech hubs in Bulgaria was due to the abundance of tech talent, explains Zach Maybury, DraftKings’ VP of engineering. “Bulgaria has become a top outsourcing destination in Eastern Europe due to its extensive pool of experienced software developers. Many professionals possess over three years of hands-on experience and excel in full-stack, back-end and front-end programming.”

The Sofia tech hub, which has 450 staff and opened in 2011, primarily focuses on engineering and product positions, encompassing various levels of software engineers, product managers, manual and automation quality assurance and DevOps, among others. Meanwhile, the 400-person Plovdiv tech hub, established in 2010, houses representatives in technical support and engineering as well as customer support, payments, and trading and fraud.

According to a report by FT-owned fDi Intelligence and media company TNW on the tech cities of the future 2020/21, Sofia ranked 20th overall out of 76 European cities while also taking seventh spot for cost-effectiveness. In Plovdiv, with its population of around 340,000, IT and business process outsourcing were highlighted as the fastest-growing sectors, according to an Investment Destination Plovdiv report published by the Plovdiv Municipality in 2021, accounting for 7,000 jobs and a 7.6% annual growth productivity.

DraftKings’ predominant source of tech talent in the Eastern European country comes from outside the sports entertainment and gaming industry. Maybury elaborates: “Our recruitment focus leans heavily towards individuals with experience in various software companies, startups and large corporations.”

Tech roles that are more difficult to fill due to a higher level of experience and specialised skills required are engineers in DevOps, site reliability and principal software.

Movement of staff between the US gambling and DFS giant’s tech hubs is not uncommon, Maybury tells EGR, and over the past few years he has witnessed domestic and international relocations such as transfers between Sofia and Plovdiv, transitions from Ukraine to Bulgaria, as well as between Bulgaria or Ukraine to North America. “We recognise the advantages of cultivating a collaborative and interconnected workforce, and opportunities arise for employees to explore different roles within our various tech hubs,” he adds.

Keeping connected between the Boston-headquartered operator’s tech hubs is facilitated through communication tools such as Zoom and Slack, regular team meetings, updates and cross-functional collaboration sessions conducted onsite or online. There are also regular global “All Hands” meetings for staff, featuring the CEO, and on a departmental basis. 

Maybury says the focus for its Bulgaria offices is to maintain stability and retention of its workforce rather than pursuing aggressive expansion. He states: “We aim to sustain the existing team, ensuring our tech hubs in Bulgaria remain a stable and conducive environment for our employees. This approach allows us to concentrate on the development, wellbeing and job satisfaction of our current staff, emphasising quality over quantity in our tech operations in Bulgaria.”

LeoVegas Group, Poland

Launch: 2022 (permanent hub)

Tech hub: Warsaw

Chief product and technology officer: Mattias Wedar

Located in the heart of Warsaw, above the entrance of Hala Koszyki – a trendy market hall stuffed with restaurants and boutiques – LeoVegas Group’s tech hub is the base for around 60 technologists. And just like any other of the company’s offices dotted across Europe, the Warsaw hub is kitted out with a matching colour scheme and furnishings. The décor is a clever mix of functional and chic. “We wanted it to look like a LeoVegas office and for the team to feel part of the group,” explains Mattias Wedar, chief product and technology officer (CPTO) at LeoVegas Group. “They are treated like any other technology office within LeoVegas. It’s not an outsourcing centre; they really are part of the DNA of the organisation, so it’s just another one of our offices.”    

One reason to open this hub in Poland, in the first half of 2022, was the fierce competition among digital companies for developers and engineers in Stockholm, where the operator’s HQ is situated. Stockholm, being home to the likes of audio-streaming giant Spotify and fintech firms Klarna and Trustly, magnifies the struggle to hire the best people. “A lot of tech talent is being scouted here in Stockholm and in Sweden,” Wedar acknowledges.

After scoping various cities across Europe, Warsaw ended up the preferred choice. The city being in the same time zone as Stockholm and just a one-hour-and-40-minute flight from the Swedish capital was another big plus. As was Poland being part of the EU.

Besides boasting a population of around 1.8 million, Warsaw has more than 20 universities offering computer science courses. So, there’s a deep pool of graduates in the city – and the country for that matter. Wedar says: “Poland is a big country with something like 40 million people and it has great universities, great technology skills, and GDP [gross domestic product] is growing. It’s an innovative and vibrant market.” Yet salaries in what is one of the world’s fastest growing economies aren’t as low as you might assume. “Poland is cheaper [than Sweden], but it’s not like 50% cheaper or anything,” Wedar clarifies. Rather than potential cost savings from hiring in Central Europe, the Warsaw tech hub was about boosting LeoVegas Group’s capability to support the launch of new brands and enter new markets.

Before its permanent base at Hala Koszyki, the hub was run from a co-working space with just a handful of employees. “We didn’t know how it would pan out, so we started light and nimble. The first office had about six seats.” Since then, the headcount has “grown organically”. 

Wedar continues: “We had an initial ambition to be about 30 people in the first year and a half, but we have exceeded that target with around 60 today.” LeoVegas Group has invested heavily in onboarding to ensure employees and contractors there feel part of the wider business. “We don’t have gaming operations in Poland so we don’t have a licence there, which means it was even more important for us to make them feel welcome. I have spent some time there, as has our co-founder Gustaf [Hagman], to implement what we call the ‘Leo culture’.”

Most of the workforce are deployed on the group’s back-end systems, or more specifically the PAM, otherwise known as Rhino. There are also a few team members focused on front-end development and payments. “They are all working on the normal roadmap elements. We don’t say, ‘The Polish office is only doing maintenance’ or anything; it’s all kinds of innovative product development,” Wedar says. The setup has been structured so people are in different teams that are part of larger teams that could, for example, be based in Stockholm or the company’s most recently opened tech hub in Málaga. “Those three could combine to become a unit,” he says.

“It’s important to mention that the growth in Warsaw has been in parallel to bigger growth overall in our technology organisation. We have over 500 people now and Warsaw is a big contributor.”

As the conversation draws to a close, Wedar highlights one challenge that is impacting the hub, namely the explosion in remote working over the past few years and how mammoth international tech companies are now able to cast their recruitment nets further and wider than ever before. “We have seen, since Covid-19, that a lot of American companies are hiring remotely and offering US salaries,” he notes.

Bally’s Interactive, UK

Launch: 2021

Tech hub: Manchester

SVP of sports technology: Ravi Haldahalli

Since the acquisition of UX, design and software firm Degree 53 in October 2021, Bally’s Interactive has continued to build on the original anchor team in Manchester, which currently amounts to 60 people. In April 2023, a new floor was opened to accommodate the growing team. The large open-plan design contains an additional kitchen and dining area plus extra meeting rooms and more social spaces such as a games room.   

The Bally’s tech team covers native iOS and Android app development, web development, programming language Java, as well as product design and project management.

The advantage of having a tech hub in Manchester is that it has become a hotbed for tech startups, venture capitalist investment and fintech businesses, alongside having three universities (University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Salford) within walking distance of the city centre, providing access to graduate-level top talent. Last year, the city was named the fastest-growing tech hub in the North of England and the largest outside of London and the South East, according to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

SVP of sports technology Ravi Haldahalli, who also oversees the tech teams in London, Toronto, Canada, and Warwick, Rhode Island, says the operator hosts app development meetups in Manchester to showcase Bally’s as a company while acting as a recruitment channel for hiring talent. These are held in the office on a monthly basis, when staff members and company outsiders come in to present ideas.

Bally’s also has a large presence in London, with a headcount of 700 spread over three floors, meaning there are often staff visiting between the two UK offices. The Rhode Island-headquartered operator currently runs a two-year graduate scheme in London and is in the process of looking at ways to extend it in Manchester as well. Haldahalli tells EGR that Manchester is one of the hubs Bally’s continues to invest in due to the lower cost of hiring resources and its close proximity to London.

Typically, the Bally’s tech staff in Manchester come from a variety of backgrounds, with some even hailing from HR and recruitment, while several of the operator’s senior app developers are self-taught. “What we look for is aptitude, culture and a willingness to learn. We’re not as rigid as requiring people to have certain degrees or specific backgrounds,” Haldahalli explains.

Bally’s has recruited staff for its tech hub from within the gaming industry as well as those with fintech, travel, tech and consultancy backgrounds.

“What matters is that we have a really strong core team in Manchester with gambling industry knowledge. This allows us to onboard people from different backgrounds, train them and grow them in the industry.” 

The tech roles that are particularly tricky to fill are Java resources due to a limited pool of talent in the region possessing that specific skillset, although there have been recruits that started from scratch and were trained up. On the other hand, people with native skills are much easier to source.

While Bally’s has supported members of staff who have expressed an interest in relocation to a US office, for instance, there is the added complexity of sponsorship and visas involved. Haldahalli says: “It all depends on the business needs and the talent required, but it’s definitely something we’ve done in the past and still do.” Mostly, the movement tends to be between the Manchester and London offices.

Cross-collaboration of tech teams across Bally’s’ offices hasn’t been difficult at all as since Covid-19 the company is comfortable with hybrid and part-time remote/in-person working patterns. “We tend to find ways where we bring teams together,” says the SVP of sports technology. “I strongly think that once you have a good working relationship, meet a few times face to face and build that trust, then you can successfully carry that on in a more remote type of setup.”

Having tech hubs in Rhode Island and Toronto, both on Eastern Time, alongside the two UK offices, has been hugely beneficial in terms of coverage across two time zones. Haldahalli is a prime example of this as he is based in the Warwick, Rhode Island office but also manages the engineering teams in Manchester and London. “There are [tech] resources in Rhode Island as well and because we have different time zones and coverage, teams can hand it over to whichever time zone is most active and that helps us keep the product development work going and jump on issues as they arise,” he points out.