Bet365, the world’s largest online gambling company, has announced plans to expand its Manchester operation from 60 to more than 150 staff.
The Stoke-based company opened a satellite office in Manchester’s Spring Gardens last April.
Warren Hughes, Head of Systems Development for bet365 Manchester, said: “We assumed it would take around six to 12 months to fill 60 vacancies. We were wrong.
“After six months, we’d taken on a second floor and hired around 85 people and expect to grow to over 150 strong following the next round of recruitment.
“Manchester’s deep talent pool has enabled us to keep the bar high and attract a fine calibre of developer. We’ve been impressed by how quickly the new office has become productive.
“The team has established a solid working relationship with our developers in Stoke and their close collaboration has successfully delivered significant pieces of work including our new HTML5 desktop website.”
During the next phase, bet365 will be recruiting at all levels including junior and senior developers, team leads, tech leads and project managers.
“We’ve found that the unique technical challenges on offer are helping us to attract Manchester’s top talent,” Hughes added.
“An average Saturday for us is busier than most e-commerce sites are on Black Friday. There are few places where you’ll be as challenged and stretched.”
The company will also begin to broaden its development work in Manchester, enabling developers to cross train in new technologies including programming languages such as Erlang, Elixir and Go.
“We currently have five teams providing software development and testing across sports, gaming, trading and customer account management,” Hughes said.
“This year, we will be looking to extend these and also look at mobile and middleware expansions if there’s a good case to doing so.”
