Senior Backend Engineer, Core Trading Systems

Senior Backend Engineer, Core Trading Systems

$175k – $250k • meaningful equity

Summary:

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:

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.

What are we looking for?

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.

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.

Bonus

• 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.

Who is Novig?

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.

Compensation & 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