Senior Backend Engineer (Trading Systems)

Location: New York, Union Square, NYC, United States. The role includes occasional nights, weekends, and on-call coverage of approximately one weekend every six weeks.

Salary: $200,000–$260,000 base annually, plus meaningful equity.

Company

A sports prediction-market company with a market-making and proprietary trading operation providing liquidity across event-contract and prediction-market venues.

What you will do

• Architect and build core trading systems, including matching engines, market-data pipelines, risk controls, and real-time state machines.
• Design deterministic, event-driven systems for matching, settlement, and market-making with strong ordering and idempotency guarantees.
• Build high-throughput, low-latency infrastructure for data ingestion, distribution, replay, order gateways, session management, and pre- and at-trade risk checks.
• Develop APIs for algorithmic trading integrations and reliable endpoints for programmatic and UI clients.
• Collaborate with frontend, trading, product, and SRE functions on recovery, failover, observability, performance, and operational readiness.
• Optimize hot paths using profiling and tracing while expanding modular backend services and supporting production debugging.

Requirements

• 4+ years of backend engineering experience, ideally with distributed or real-time systems.
• Proficiency in Go, Rust, or C++ and knowledge of concurrent programming and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with relational databases; PostgreSQL is preferred.
• Understanding of CAP tradeoffs, ordering semantics, and consistency and availability considerations.
• Clear communication, complex problem-solving, and ownership across broad technical areas.
• Availability for occasional nights, weekends, and on-call coverage connected to live sports operations.

Nice to have

• Experience with matching engines, market-making systems, order books, HFT infrastructure, Kafka, Redis, real-time streaming systems, or financial exchanges.
• Interest in sports, betting, and market microstructure.

Culture & Benefits

• Small, senior team with direct exposure to trading, capital, counterparties, and production results.
• High ownership, fast decision-making, and limited process overhead.
• 100% health premium coverage and 99% dental and vision coverage.
• 401(k) with a 4% company match, plus HSA and a $1,080 annual company contribution.
• Lunch stipend when working from the NYC office and dinner stipend for late office work.
• Meaningful equity for every employee.