Job Specifications
Senior Backend Engineer — Core Trading Systems
$175k–$250k base + equity
New York, NY (Hybrid)
The Opportunity
We’re hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to help build the core trading infrastructure for a next-generation, real-time prediction marketplace. Backed by top-tier venture capital and prominent operators, this early-stage company is applying exchange-grade engineering principles to a massive, fast-growing sports market.
Today’s sports betting landscape is dominated by centralized operators with poor pricing, latency issues, and opaque practices. This team is building a commission-free, peer-to-peer trading platform that lets users interact directly with the market — no house, no hidden margins.
This is a foundational engineering role focused on designing and scaling the systems that power real-time markets.
What You’ll Work On
Trading & Exchange Infrastructure
Design and implement deterministic state machines for matching, settlement, and market lifecycle flows
Build and optimize order books, matching logic, and market data pipelines
Architect high-throughput, low-latency systems with strong correctness guarantees
Implement pre-trade and at-trade risk controls, session management, and order gateways
Real-Time Systems & Market Data
Develop ingestion, distribution, and replay systems for real-time market data
Ensure strict ordering, idempotency, and consistency across distributed services
Optimize hot paths using profiling, tracing, and performance tooling
APIs & Platform Design
Build developer-first APIs supporting both UI clients and algorithmic trading use cases
Partner with frontend and product teams to deliver seamless, real-time user experiences
Contribute to architectural decisions that support scale, modularity, and regulatory evolution
Reliability & Operations
Collaborate with platform/SRE teams on observability, recovery, and failover strategies
Participate in production debugging and operational readiness for real-time systems
What We’re Looking For
We’re looking for engineers who are deeply interested in trading systems, market structure, and distributed systems — people who enjoy working close to the metal and care deeply about performance and correctness.
Requirements
4+ years of backend engineering experience
Strong proficiency in Go, Rust, or C++
Experience building distributed, event-driven, or real-time systems
Solid understanding of concurrency, ordering semantics, and consistency tradeoffs
Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred)
Ability to operate autonomously in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
Strong communication and collaboration skills
Nice to Have
Experience with matching engines, order books, market-making, or trading platforms
Exposure to Kafka, Redis, streaming systems, or low-latency pipelines
Background in financial exchanges, prediction markets, or quant/trading environments
Personal interest in sports, betting markets, or market microstructure
Compensation & Benefits
Top-of-market salary + meaningful equity
100% employer-covered health insurance (90% dental & vision)
401(k) with up to 4% match
HSA with annual employer contribution
Daily food or commuter stipend
Flexible PTO
Hybrid-friendly NYC office
About the Company
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