Meet The Team: A Q&A Session With Huddle’s Senior Backend Engineer

In this Q&A, we chat with Marko Ivić, a Senior Backend Engineer at Huddle, about his journey into backend development and the sports betting industry. Marko shares how his passion for technical problem-solving led him to Huddle. He also discusses how he balances his daily work with mentoring his team, the innovative tools he's proud to have introduced, and the rewarding projects that have shaped his career. Whether you're into tech or sports betting, Marko's insights offer a valuable look into the world of backend engineering.

What inspired you to pursue a career in backend development, and how did you find your way into the sports betting industry, specifically with Huddle?

Marko: Backend engineering wasn’t where I started my professional journey, but it's the role I fell in love with. This position strikes the perfect balance for me between staying close to the technical solution and being involved in product development. This naturally leads to how I ended up here. Huddle was recommended to me by a friend as a startup filled with skilled people working on tough challenges. When I learned that Huddle was also developing its own product, I knew I had to apply. And that’s how I found my way into the sports betting industry.

As a Senior Backend Engineer, how do you balance the demands of coding with the responsibilities of mentoring and guiding your team? Can you share some strategies that have been effective in fostering innovation within your team?

Marko: Working in a team always comes with its challenges, and this is amplified when guiding the team and mentoring colleagues. I believe it’s important for the entire team to have a clear vision of the product we are developing. This helps us align better, making the process more collaborative rather than purely directive. Once this is set up, it’s crucial to trust your team to tackle challenges independently. My role is to enable them to achieve product goals with minimal guidance, which often comes down to offering suggestions or helping with debugging. It’s essential to unblock others’ workflows as quickly as possible to keep projects on track. This requires a lot of context switching, but it’s necessary to keep things moving forward. Innovation happens at every step of the way. I find it beneficial to teach colleagues how to discuss technical solutions and understand that we are challenging the solutions, not them personally. We’ve seen time and again that open communication greatly enhances our innovation culture at Huddle.

What recent technological advancements or tools have you integrated into Huddle’s backend systems that you’re particularly proud of? 
Marko: Sports betting is a very competitive industry, and having near real-time data gives us an edge over the competition. Recently, we integrated a streaming database into our system. This allows us to process huge amounts of data quickly. Not only can we calculate the necessary data fast and at scale, but we can also stream results to the frontend in near real-time.

Can you describe a particularly challenging project you’ve worked on at Huddle? What were the key obstacles, and how did your team overcome them to deliver a successful outcome?
Marko: This is closely related to the previous answer. We needed to perform many calculations per second and at scale. Achieving this with the user experience we wanted wasn’t feasible with in-memory processing. So, we turned to alternative tools that would enable us to deliver the desired results. We eventually settled on a streaming database, which solved most of our challenges. This experience underscored the importance of choosing the right tool for the job—it can make all the difference.

Collaboration is key in a tech-driven environment. How do you ensure effective communication and collaboration between the backend team and other departments such as frontend, DevOps, and data teams?
Marko: Huddle’s engineering teams are relatively small but lean, which allows us to maintain open and direct communication between teams, both horizontally and vertically. Additionally, our workflow, based on agile methodology, enables us to shuffle short-term goals quickly and easily. As a result, we’re able to deliver meaningful value to our product on a daily basis.

Looking back on your career so far at Huddle, what has been the most rewarding experience or project for you that was significant for Huddle? What makes it stand out?

Marko: Working on the Bet Ticker app has been one of the most rewarding experiences. I was fortunate to be entrusted with leading this initiative from the start. This project provided me with invaluable insight into the entire product development process, from product scoping and refinement to system design, implementation, testing, mentoring, and coordination with other teams. Leading this initiative required me to wear many hats, but in the end, it was incredibly fulfilling to deliver a viable and stable product successfully.

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