--- title: 'Senior Backend Engineer, Core Trading Systems at Novig' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-backend-engineer-core-trading-systems-novig-new-york-41101pnka4bz' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-14' --- # Senior Backend Engineer, Core Trading Systems at Novig - **Company:** Novig - **Location:** New York, NY - **Employment:** full-time - **Posted:** 2026-10-08 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-14 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/novig/4b1c059d-082b-49bc-9f05-4357fe5c4eec ## Job description Senior Backend Engineer, Core Trading Systems $200k – $260k • meaningful equity ## About MAG MAG is the market-making arm of Novig. We provide liquidity across sportsrelated event-contract and prediction-market venues. We operate lean by design. A small, senior team with direct exposure to trading, capital, and counterparty work, supported by Novig's broader platform. With Novig recently becoming a CFTC-designated market — the fastest designation of its kind in US history— we're bringing the prediction market built for sports fans nationwide. We're backed by some of Silicon Valley's top investors — Pantera, Forerunner, Lux, NFX, Paul Graham, and Joe Montana — who have collectively invested over $100M behind this vision." ## About the Role As a Senior Backend Engineer at MAG, you’ll build the core trading engine that powers our market-making across multiple prediction-market and event-contract venues. You’ll own the infrastructure that connects to each venue, normalizes real-time market data, manages orders and positions, and enforces risk controls, all with the reliability that live sports demand. You’ll work directly with our traders, turning their feedback into faster execution, better tooling, and new strategy capabilities, with results you’ll see in PnL within days. Because our markets run on the sports calendar, you’ll share on-call duty and cover one weekend roughly every six weeks. This is a high-ownership role on a small team where your architectural decisions will shape how the entire trading operation scales. Who you are and why this role will excite you - Excited to architect and build MAG’s core systems, including the trading engine, market-data pipelines, risk controls, and real-time state machines, shaping the platform at a foundational level - Design and implement deterministic, event-driven systems for matching, settlement, and market-making flows, with strong ordering and idempotency guarantees - Build high-throughput, low-latency infrastructure for data ingestion, distribution, replay, order gateways, session management, and pre-/at-trade risk checks - Develop developer-first APIs for algorithmic trading integrations and high-reliability endpoints for programmatic and UI clients - Collaborate closely with frontend, trading, product, and SRE teams to maintain a seamless, reliable user experience, including recovery, failover, observability, and performance optimization - Expand product surface via modular backend services, contribute to architecture discussions, operational readiness, and production debugging - Optimize system hot paths using profiling, tracing, and performance tools; improve architecture for modularity, stability, and future regulatory compliance - Bring 4+ years of backend engineering experience, ideally in distributed or real-time systems, with proficiency in Go, Rust, or C++ and knowledge of concurrent programming, event-driven architectures, and relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred) - Understand CAP tradeoffs, ordering semantics, and consistency/availability considerations; navigate ambiguity and take ownership across large technical surfaces - Communicate clearly, solve complex problems, and collaborate effectively across teams Bonus: - Experience with matching engines, market-making systems, order books, HFT infrastructure, Kafka, Redis, real-time streaming systems, or financial exchanges - Passion for sports, betting, and market microstructure, with curiosity about building highly reliable trading systems Why work here, in the words of the people who do “I work with extremely stellar people, I own real systems, and decisions happen fast. No politics, no waiting for needless red tape. If something's broken, I fix it. If I build something good, it ships.” “The people! So smart, thoughtful, fun to work with, passionate about their craft, etc” “I'm having the most fun I've had in my entire career.” If you want responsibility, trust, and the chance to help build the future of sports prediction markets - take your shot, we’d love to connect. Not for everyone - Our work is tied to live sports - that means potential nights, weekends, and pressure included. - If you need clear swim lanes, a heavy process, or someone to tell you what to do, this won’t be the right environment. ## Compensation & benefits - $200k – $260k base, benchmarked at top-tier tech companies - Meaningful equity for every employee, regardless of role - 100% health premiums covered - 99% dental & vision covered - 401(k) with 4% company match - HSA + $1,080 annual company contribution - $27/day lunch stipend when working from our NYC office - $35/day dinner stipend when working from the NYC office after 6:30pm Homebase Union Square, NYC ## About Novig ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Novig is a commission-free, peer-to-peer sports prediction market that allows users to trade on sports outcomes against each other rather than against the house. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series A; Y Combinator Summer 2022) - **Headquarters**: New York, New York, USA - **Founded**: 2021 - **Founders**: Jacob Fortinsky (CEO) and Kelechi Ukah (CTO) ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Sports prediction markets / sports trading (disrupting traditional sportsbooks) - **Target customers**: B2C – sports fans and retail traders looking for fair, transparent betting alternatives - **Mission**: “Create a faster, fairer future for traders and fans — free from hidden fees, house edges, and account limits.” ## Products & Services - **[Novig Platform]**: A mobile and web app that enables peer-to-peer sports trading with zero commission. Users set their own odds, trade in real-time, and benefit from full market transparency. Available in 35+ U.S. states. ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed (private company) - **Key Metric**: Over $105 million raised in total funding (including a $18M Series A announced in 2026) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Pantera Capital, Forerunner Ventures, Lux Capital, NFX, Y Combinator, Paul Graham, Joe Montana - **Growth Signals**: - Fastest growing sports prediction market in the U.S. - Received CFTC approval to operate as a regulated exchange - Team grew to 55 employees (~23 in product & engineering) - Available in 35+ states nationwide ## Competitive Advantages - **Commission-free model**: No house edge or hidden fees; users trade directly with each other. - **Peer-to-peer exchange**: Better pricing and transparency than traditional sportsbooks. - **Regulatory edge**: CFTC-regulated, providing legitimacy and trust in a grey-market industry. - **Backed by top-tier investors**: Deep war chest and network from Silicon Valley’s best. ## Strategic Focus - Continue expanding into new states and product features. - Drive user adoption by marketing the fairness and efficiency of prediction markets vs. sportsbooks. - Build out engineering and operations teams to scale the platform and maintain reliability during high-traffic events. ## Why Work Here - **High-growth, well-funded startup**: Over $105M raised with massive market opportunity in the expanding sports betting sector. - **Impact & ownership**: Engineers and product teams directly shape a platform used by millions. - **Engineering culture**: Modern tech stack (Rust, TypeScript, React Native, Node.js, Python, AWS, Kafka, GraphQL, Redis, PostgreSQL, Terraform, Docker). - **Work model**: Hybrid in-office (NYC headquarters) with 4 days/week in-office expected; remote options available for select roles. - **Benefits**: Competitive salary ($170K–$225K for L4 Backend Engineer), equity, comprehensive health coverage. - **Values-driven**: “Challenge the House”, “Truth Over Ego”, “Move Fast, Think Long”, “Fans First, Always”. - **Passionate team**: Sports fans building for sports fans. ## Sources 1. [Y Combinator – Novig](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/novig) 2. [Novig Careers](https://novig.com/careers) 3. [Built In – Novig](http://www.builtin.com/company/novig) 4. 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