Senior Backend Engineer, Core Trading Systems

$200k - $260k meaningful equity

MAG is the market-making arm of Novig. We provide liquidity across sports related event-contract and prediction-market venues. We operate lean by design. A small, senior team with direct exposure to trading, capital, and counter party 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.

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.

• 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

“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,…