Will Hester Email & Phone Number

Boston, Massachusetts, Us

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Us

With a sole focus on the growing Engineering department, managed continued improvements to the business's most critical revenue-generating projects while mentoring senior Engineers into leaders and collaborators with our strongest partners. Assisted board of directors with new CEO search. Coordinated with new Product leaders on procedures and best practices.

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Us

Enhanced the Product Development process to be driven by business outcomes, following a significant expansion of the department. Spearheaded discussions with the Executive Team, facilitating consensus on project prioritization and roadmap planning. Led efforts in disseminating knowledge throughout the organization that were instrumental in aligning focus on initiatives that generate the highest net revenue. Oversaw projects from their inception through to refinement, goal-setting, development, and production, managing iterations until achieving the targeted business outcomes, which resulted in the generation of millions of dollars in net revenue.After years of scaling up the Product department, leveling-up our Product talent, developing mature Product Development practices, and maintaining SIS's highest eNPS department, I was finally able to relinquish Product responsibilities to a dedicated Product leader to focus my efforts on SIS's rapidly-growing Engineering department.

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Us

Founded the Product Development department by defining the Engineering and Product interview processes from scratch, handling the end-to-end hiring process from contact to scheduling to offer and onboarding, and introducing the company’s first knowledge management and communication tools, each receiving 80% adoption in two weeks and becoming the de facto hubs of the organization, building an Agile culture of knowledge sharing. While overseeing the company's highest eNPS department, including multiple managers, and owning a multi-million-dollar budget, I've been a key member of the Senior Leadership Team, working closely with our board of directors, pitching investors in fundraising rounds, and negotiating deals with 3rd parties.

Boston, Massachusetts, Us

Scaled on-prem software that processes billions of dollars per month across 11 jurisdictions while managing engineers’ development into trusted roles in the Engineering organization. Designed the plan for transitioning all data that powers the Sportsbook product to a new provider. Developed and maintained a DFS monitoring webapp used by 100s employees that has since been owned and adopted internally.

Boston, Massachusetts, Us

Instituted engineering conventions, standards, and norms for the entire team of engineers and wrote the code review guidelines that would be adopted by the Engineering organization as a whole. One of <10 Engineers trusted with write access to sensitive databases to remedy production issues. Became the primary point of contact for all Sportsbook backend software.Collaborated with the Operations team on market analysis and created automated operational tooling, reducing the time to assess us versus our competition from hours to seconds.

Boston, Massachusetts, Us

Awarded a patent (#10744413) while being the sole backend developer of the DK Live app before being selected for the initial group of Engineers put on the Sportsbook project, where I architected the API that would serve the country’s first non-NV online sportsbook. While contributing across all Sportsbook teams (Engineering and non-Engineering), I developed a side project that would become the Operations team’s admin tool. As the Sportsbook team's Engineer with the most domain knowledge, I authored tech plans for the Sportsbook product’s two largest projects in history (Bet Slip and Bet History) and also frequently acted as the backend team's Product Owner. I also interviewed 100s of candidates for roles spanning Engineering, Product, and Operations.In a couple of company-firsts, I directed a cross-functional team that saw our credit card acceptance rate double and led all engineering and operational efforts for an industry-first sports betting competition.While still having a passion for the DFS product as a member of the Sportsbook team, I continued to champion for DFS product improvements, eventually being the catalyst for the addition of revenue-improving, mobile-centric features such as multi-entry.

Boston, Massachusetts, Us

Owned the stats processing engine, turning data feeds into fantasy points while also handling the related production issues via exclusive DB write access and headed emergency communications. Oversaw the addition of four new DFS sports: League of Legends, CFL, Golf, and Soccer. Modernized the draft experience page with extendable, React-friendly dataflows. On my own accord, I created an internal DFS Chrome extension, increasing employee contest engagement.

Austin, Texas, Us

Managed the phasing out of old technologies affecting nearly 2 million jobs while developing services and web applications using Java, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL. Led organization across company divisions leading to the improvement of internal job aggregation tools.

Austin, Texas, Us

Initiated a project that evaluated the options for migrating older technologies that affected 20% of total jobs and presented findings to Engineering leaders who used my research in roadmap decisions. Utilized internal tools for job classification with CSS, regular expressions, and PHP.

Master'S Degree, Computer Science

Bachelor'S Degree, Electrical And Computer Engineering

Bachelor'S Degree, Computer Science