The folks from Opentag joined our community in October and ever since they’ve been welcoming at least one new member into their team every week! With such fast growth we feel like we just have to share more about them.

Let’s start with the easiest part - the introduction! Opentag is a fully backed startup company in theSports Betting & Gaming industry. To put it simply - they’re building a full betting platform from scratch (how cool is that!?).
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The business idea 💡

For well over a decade, Opentag’s team has been thinking about how they can disrupt the old betting market that had been dominated for years by slow-moving mega corporations. Five months ago they closed their full investment and started building a product that will bring the market up to speed with the latest technologies and standards. Their offering is a masterpiece platform that delivers operational excellence for every field of the Sports Betting and Gaming and on all of the different markets where betting is applied. They support their offering by providing fully scaled API for any of their components and also the APIs, Data solutions and Serviceable algorithms are open to any of their clients, which gives total freedom to the clients without damaging the full coverage of the service.
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Team 👨👩👧👦

The company is growing fast and in the last 4 months, they’ve managed to establish a team of 18 people in Sofia, and another one of 20 people in Kiev. When meeting them you’ll find some great product people, outstanding tech leads, architects, QAs, backend developers, front end developers, full stack developers and scrum masters. As Rea Maor, CTO of Opentag defines it: ‘A full team from scratch for a full platform from scratch’. Also the plans for the Bulgarian team are ambitious - Opentag plans on tripling the size of their team by the end of 2020 (and that’s another WoW for us😮).
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The tech ⚙️

Technology wise the team has fully invested in a Microservices environment and containerized deployment. They’re working in close partnership with the Google Cloud team and are using a fully decentralized kubernetes deployment (multi cloud). To achieve maximum development speed they’re focused on the different stacks, depending on the office location and the local availability of developers. In Sofia, they’re doing JAVA (Spring and Spring boot), Golang for backend and ReactJS for front end, while in Kiev the stack is NodeJS, PHP (Symfony) and Golang for backend and ReactJS for front end. Rea adds: ‘The actual architecture allows us (within reason) to give greater freedom to each team and unit to choose their internal stack and approach. By doing this we are empowering the teams to take ownership over their modules and their delivery.’
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Culture ✌️

As a newly started business, Rea is sharing that a lot of the cultural decisions are coming up from the teams themselves. ‘Some teams prefer a stricter structure with a team lead, some prefer to work on a flat hierarchy. We try to guide them by only applying the minimal frame of work and from there we give full trust and freedom.

He also adds that: ‘There are no suits, no protocols, no closed door mentality - we don't do or need the "seniority card", we always search for like-minded individuals to join us, Juniors, Middles and Seniors - we have developers that are fresh out of university and we've had a developer that is over 60(!). Age or seniority doesn't play a card, only passion and need for innovation and growth. if we need to sum it all up - we (the management) focuses only on the Macro, we put trust and faith in the people we hire to easily fill in the Micro.

We’re happy to welcome Rea and Opentag’s team in the Puzl family! Wishing you a productive and amazing time with us!