About the position
Novig is backed by Forerunner Ventures, YC, Lux, Soma, Innospark, Paul Graham, Joe Montana, and founders of Instacart and Dropbox — along with leading angels and operators. We’re building the future of sports prediction markets using real exchange-grade infrastructure.
Sports betting is a $300B market dominated by retail sportsbooks with wide spreads, discriminatory practices, latency issues, and a poor user experience. Novig is building a commission-free, peer-to-peer exchange that guarantees users the best lines by letting them play directly against friends or the market itself.
We are hiring a Senior Backend Engineer for Core Trading Systems to architect and build our matching engine, market-data pipelines, risk controls, and real-time state machines. This is a high-impact, founding engineering role shaping the core of the Novig platform.
You will build and refine the core infrastructure that powers a real-time prediction market:
Exchange Infrastructure / Real-Time Systems
Design and implement deterministic state machines for matching, settlement, and market-making flows.
Architect high-throughput market data ingestion, distribution, and replay systems.
Build order gateways, session management, and pre-/at-trade risk checks.
Optimize for ultra-low latency, throughput, and correctness guarantees.
APIs & Developer Experience
Build a developer-first API for algorithmic trading integrations.
Create high-reliability endpoints for programmatic and UI client interactions.
Collaborate with frontend and product teams to maintain a seamless user experience.
Performance, Scale, and Reliability
Profile and optimize system hot paths using flamegraphs, tracing, and performance tooling.
Collaborate with Platform/SRE to ensure recovery, failover, and observability of real-time systems.
Improve the architecture for modularity, stability, and future regulatory requirements.
Responsibilities
• Build and evolve Novig’s matching engine and real-time trading services.
• Design scalable, event-driven systems with strong ordering and idempotency guarantees.
• Work closely with trading engineers to implement market microstructure logic.
• Expand our product surface via modular backend services.
• Develop developer-first APIs enabling external algorithms to trade on Novig.
• Contribute to architecture discussions, operational readiness, and production debugging.
Requirements
• Bachelor’s/Master’s in CS or related technical field.
• 4+ years backend engineering experience, ideally in distributed systems, real-time systems, or trading infrastructure.
• Strong proficiency in Go, Rust, or C++.
• Experience with concurrent programming, event-driven architectures, and relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred).
• Understanding of CAP tradeoffs, ordering semantics, and consistency/availability considerations.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity and take ownership across large technical surfaces.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills.
Nice-to-haves
• Experience with matching engines, market-making systems, order books, or HFT infrastructure.
• Experience with Kafka, Redis, or real-time streaming systems.
• Familiarity with financial exchanges or prediction markets.
• Interest in sports, betting, and market microstructure.
Benefits
• 100% health premium coverage, 90% dental & vision
• 4% 401(k) match
• HSA with $1,080 annual employer contribution
• $27/day food or commuter stipend
• Flexible PTO
• New NYC office, hybrid-friendly
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