Chaos to Golden Path - How FanDuel's Eventing Strategy Transformed Enterprise Event Streaming

When 30% of your engineering time is spent on non-value-added data tasks, it's time for radical change. This talk chronicles FanDuel's ambitious Streamlined Event Acquisition Strategy (SEAS) - a company-wide migration from fragmented, team-specific solutions to a unified Kafka/Flink-based event streaming platform that now processes billions of events daily.

We'll explore how our Data Team led the transformation from a world where every team reinvented the event publishing wheel to a standardized "golden path" that reduced time-to-insight by 60% while cutting infrastructure costs significantly. The journey wasn't just technical - it required cultural change, cross-team collaboration, and careful change management across dozens of product teams.

Key topics covered:

The business case that drove SEAS: quantifying the hidden costs of data fragmentation

Designing the golden path: standardized event formats, schema evolution, and strong data contracts

Migration strategies that kept production systems running during the transition

Building language-agnostic SDKs and tooling that made adoption effortless

Measuring success: from engineering velocity to data quality improvements

Building the dream-team that can drive this transformation forward

Real-world examples include migrating our high-volume betting systems during football season, handling schema evolution for legacy integrations, and the monitoring strategies that prevented data quality disasters.

Attendees will learn practical frameworks for driving enterprise-wide streaming standardization in complex, multi-team environments.