Tony Cui

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 -…