Behind the bet with Katarzyna Osuch-Bukowska

In today's Behind the bet interview spotlight on Kasia - Principal Engineering Lead for Sportsbook channel! We asked her some questions about her career story & perspective of working here at Grand Parade. Read on! 

Tell us a bit about you...

Master of Engineering. Manager. Wife. Fan of castles. Diver.

Tell us about your role and what it involves?

I joined WH in May as Principal Engineering Lead for Sportsbook. I am responsible for creating and driving tech initiatives within the channel. I look after all aspects of the software design lifecycle, review existing way of working, identify improvements in order to increase efficiency. My team consists of the most senior engineers. We set the standards for engineering excellence in the areas of front-end and back-end development, site reliability, quality assurance and UI. My team members remain hands-on and lead by example. They are coaches and mentors for other software developers. We cooperate also with architects and support them in the creation of solution definitions.

What excites you about tech at William Hill?

Talented engineers that I cooperate with. It is important for me to surround myself with experienced people whose expertise I trust.

Which projects are you most proud of that you’ve worked on here?

I am very proud of the current initiative to standardize the approach to Non-Functional Requirements within the Sportsbook channel. I strongly believe in this idea and I am glad that it received a positive response. Together with Jakub Kubica, the Principal Site Reliability Engineer, we were presenting this concept and collecting the feedback from the Product and the Development. It was agreed with the Product that the Horsotron Team will be a pilot team and they will incorporate our list of NFRs to the new solution definition. After completion of a pilot, we would like to make the proposed NFRs a standard for the entire Sportsbook. Our goal is to improve quality to make the future better for developers and for the product itself.

How do you go one better every day?

It is very easy to go one better every day because my job is my passion. I am a forward thinker and I never give up. I prefer productive discussions and I always want to be very precise on what I would like to achieve. Additionally, I constantly enhance my knowledge by taking part in various workshops, training or completing additional studies. Last year I decided on individual career coaching in order to develop my leadership qualities.

Can you tell us a bit about your career story?

I am so lucky to fulfil my childhood career aspirations. As a child, I was a math geek and I always knew that I would be an engineer one day. I was interested in mathematics and spent my free time taking part in many math competitions or playing chess with my grandfather.

Then I went to high school and joined a math class that offered a math program on an extended level. I met there other passionate young people that showed me computer programming. My first program was implemented in Turbo Pascal and it calculated an approximation for the integral sin(x)/x using Simpson’s rule. My classmates encouraged me to go to the Silesian University of Technology to study computer science with them and I accepted the challenge.

After completing the studies, I was working as a database developer in the financial and banking areas. A game-changing moment for me was a promotion to a managerial role. I became interested in the holistic view of tech projects. Leadership is for me an important ingredient in successfully converting an idea into a reality. I worked as a delivery manager and was responsible for a team of 17 software engineers that were developing a fund accounting platform. As a development manager, I led 6 teams implementing a property management system.

I am recently passionate about strategic management and this is a direction in which I would like my career to evolve to in the future. I believe that setting a good strategy is like a game of chess – you have to look holistically at the chessboard and plan a few moves ahead. And what is also very important – you should listen to your team, because – as they say – if you want to go fast, you should go alone, but if you want to go far, you should go together.