$175k – $250k • meaningful equity

Novig is backed by Forerunner, 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:

• 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.
  
  

• 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.
  
  

• 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.
  
  

• 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.
  
  

We love candidates who are obsessed with systems engineering, markets, and reliability. You should be excited to build exchange-grade infrastructure from the ground up.

• 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.
  
  

• 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.
  
  

Novig is redefining sports prediction markets using a sweepstakes-based model that ensures fairness, transparency, and regulatory compliance. Our team is engineering-first, high-agency, and obsessed with building the most advanced trading experience in sports.

• 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