Senior Backend Engineer, Core Trading Systems

novig.us; New York, Northern (NY, KY); On-site; USD 200,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health premiums covered

Dental & Vision coverage

401(k) with company match

Lunch stipend NYC

Dinner stipend NYC

Job summary

Novig's MAG unit seeks a Senior Backend Engineer to build the core trading engine powering market-making across prediction-market venues. You will own infrastructure connecting to venues, normalize real-time data, manage orders and risk controls, and drive reliability with on-call duties.

You will design high-throughput, low-latency backends, collaborate across teams, and contribute to scalable architecture for live sports trading. This role is NYC-based with equity and fast decision cycles.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of backend engineering experience in distributed or real-time systems.
• Proficiency in Go, Rust, or C++ with knowledge of concurrent programming and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL) and low-latency systems.
• CAP tradeoffs, ordering semantics, and consistency/availability considerations.

Responsibilities

• Build and own the core trading engine powering market-making across venues.
• Develop deterministic, event-driven systems for matching and settlement.
• Create high-throughput, low-latency data ingestion and order gateways.
• Collaborate with frontend, product, and SRE teams to ensure reliability.
• Prepare production-ready APIs for trading integrations.
• Own on-call rotation and weekend coverage.

Skills

Go

Rust

C++

Distributed systems

Real-time

PostgreSQL

Kafka

Redis

Tools

Kafka

Redis

PostgreSQL

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 Novig’s core trading systems, including the matching 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