Resume
Josh Nykamp
Senior Director of Engineering · DraftKings
Engineering executive with 15 years of success commanding technology strategy, organizational transformation, and product delivery across regulated, high scale consumer platforms. Proven force in building elite teams, integrating acquired organizations, modernizing architecture, and converting engineering investment into measurable growth. Drove AI native development across five teams to cut cycle time by 30% and launched product lines producing more than $3M in incremental ARR.
Engineering Organization DesignTechnology StrategyAI Native SDLCMergers and Acquisitions IntegrationPlatform ArchitectureDevOps & CI/CDCloud InfrastructureProduct EngineeringEnterprise ArchitectureHigh Concurrency SystemsTalent Acquisition & RetentionRegulatory ComplianceSite Reliability Engineering
Career Highlights
- →Scaled engineering from 11 to more than 70 professionals with zero regrettable attrition and 20 referral hires, helping position Jackpocket for its $750M acquisition by DraftKings
- →Cut infrastructure costs by 50% while establishing the largest production Elixir organization in the US
- →Transformed deployment cadence from 1–2 monthly releases to hundreds of deployments per month within six months, implementing progressive delivery, guarded releases, and a roll-forward incident response strategy
Experience
Jan 2024 — Present
Remote
Senior Director of Engineering
DraftKings, formerly Jackpocket
- →Completed engineering role evaluation and functional reallocation within three months by integrating 70 positions and moving SRE, security, and QA talent into shared DraftKings verticals
- →Reduced engineering cycle time by 30% by deploying Claude, Gemini, and GitHub Copilot across planning, story authoring, development, and debugging workflows
- →Generated $3M in incremental ARR by launching keno and scaling scratch-off ticket products across five states
- →Consolidated three contractor relationships into one internal capability by founding and staffing a six-person hardware engineering team for automated lottery and scratch-off dispensing machines
- →Modernized ticket discovery and segmentation by replacing a Tesseract-based OCR pipeline with a self-hosted Qwen vision model, reducing adaptation to ticket-format changes from days of engineering work to little or no code changes
Jan 2021 — Dec 2023
Remote
VP of Engineering
Jackpocket
- →Expanded engineering from 11 to more than 70 engineers, three SREs, two security engineers, and five engineering managers by activating trusted networks that produced 20 referral hires with zero regrettable attrition
- →Doubled product velocity by restructuring a monolithic organization into dedicated ecommerce and fulfillment teams with independent backlogs, ownership, and release cycles
- →Transformed delivery from 1–2 releases per month to continuous deployment within six months, embedding DevSecOps practices including automated CI/CD, static code analysis, secret scanning, feature flags, and progressive delivery
- →Established the fulfillment platform that enabled scratch-off tickets as a scalable product line, orchestrating ticket ordering, activation, automated scratching and scanning, winner validation, and ML-based ticket-to-customer matching
Sep 2019 — Jun 2021
Irvine, CA (Remote)
Director of Engineering
Weedmaps
- →Created $3M in monthly GMV within six months by hiring 13 engineers and building the Exchange platform from the ground up across California, Oklahoma, and Michigan
- →Enabled distributed execution across five teams by directing 45 engineers and coordinating nearshore staff augmentation in Costa Rica and Colombia
- →Standardized titles, leveling, and performance management during companywide growth from 50 to 211 engineers by authoring the Engineering Career Ladder and review process
Aug 2017 — Sep 2019
Irvine, CA
Engineering Manager
Weedmaps
- →Enabled hundreds of thousands of deliveries annually by building and launching Weedmaps Logistics with Android and iOS driver applications and a web dispatch interface
- →Halved infrastructure costs by piloting Elixir as the replacement for Ruby on Rails and building the training model that established the largest production Elixir organization in the United States
Oct 2016 — Aug 2017
Irvine, CA
Senior Software Engineer
Weedmaps
- →Created the foundation for three new product lines by diagnosing a minified PHP codebase with no recoverable repository and executing a complete rebuild in Elixir
- →Established the architecture for the migration to Elixir, standardizing new services on Elixir and Phoenix with REST APIs for frontend integration and RabbitMQ for asynchronous service-to-service communication
2016
Remote
Senior Software Engineer — Contractor
NBC (via Gorilla Logic)
- →Converted NBC.com from Drupal 7 to a headless architecture with a Node.js/React frontend
- →Built live streaming infrastructure for Olympic coverage on Drupal 7
2014 — 2015
Software Engineer
TalentReef
- →Built a SaaS platform for social recruiting of hourly employees using Drupal
- →Developed custom Drupal modules; managed CentOS servers
- →Managed migration from outsourced to in-house development
- →Decoupled the Drupal view layer using Angular
2013
Software Engineer
I-Behavior
- →Built internal web applications at a big data company using Laravel and Angular
2011 — 2013
Software Engineer
New Frontier Media / Hustler
- →Built a single sign-on 360° web experience for cable subscribers
- →Co-developed one of the first adult smart TV applications — built a custom JavaScript UI framework backed by a PHP API at the dawn of the smart TV era
Skills
Languages & Frameworks
Elixir / PhoenixRuby on RailsPythonNode.jsGraphQL / ApolloReact / Next.js
Cloud & DevOps
AWSGoogle Cloud PlatformGitHub ActionsArgoDockerLaunchDarkly
Artificial Intelligence
ClaudeGeminiQwenGitHub Copilot
Platforms & Operations
RabbitMQDatadogStrongDMJira
Mobile Engineering
iOSAndroid
Education
2005 — 2006
Miami Ad School
Advertising & Photography
2004 — 2005
Santa Barbara City College
General Studies
Military
2000 — 2004