Backend Engineer, Kalshi
Core
$100-250k
+ Equity
3-4 days a week in office
Trading platform for future event outcomes
Posted today
Trading platform for future event outcomes
21-100 employees
Posted today
$100-250k
+ Equity
3-4 days a week in office
21-100 employees
Company mission
To allow people to capitalize on their opinions and hedge risks that relate to their everyday lives.
Role
Who you are
- 4+ years of software engineering experience
- Experience planning and leading large projects with long-term impact on a single system or team
- Strong technical grasp and ability to tackle complex engineering problems that deliver results
- Solid understanding of relational databases and transactions
- Familiar with writing highly concurrent systems
- History of creating and applying new processes and tooling to increase engineering efficiency
- Excellent judgment on task prioritizations
- Growth mindset, with a high slope and eagerness to lean
- Love of the craft: you genuinely care and put your all into your work
- Can ship at incredible speed (very simple)
Desirable
- Experience building financial systems, FIX API, clearing infrastructure, broker connectivity, etc
- Proven experience building large-scale systems
- Like to interact directly with customers
What the job involves
- We are building a next-generation financial ecosystem (think NYSE or CME from scratch)
- As part of Kalshi, you will work on various platforms, including core exchange, clearinghouse, API infrastructure, connectivity to brokers and market makers, and others
- We are a small team, which means your responsibilities scale very rapidly, and your contributions are clear and visible, not marginal
- There is still a lot of green field at Kalshi and a low of it (including entire systems) can be yours
- This role will order matching and trade execution algorithms and data structures
- High-performance data feeds and trading APIs for clients
- High guarantee and availability clearing systems, including margining, collateral management, and banking integrations
- Lead integrations with external market makers, brokers, and hedge funds
- Stress test large-scale critical systems to ensure their robustness and maintainability
- Optimize database access patterns and internal algorithms to improve the performance of our different services
- Design new market structures (e.g., non-binary markets, scalars, futures, etc.)
- Be close to the customer (define features, ship products, iterate)! Even the backend can choose to be close to customers depending on the project
- Ship fast and with high quality
- Make decisions: we give a lot of flexibility, which also means no spoon-feeding
- The company is growing fast, which means your role will evolve and grow with the company. Joining Kalshi means you’ll be exposed to all parts of the business and define our culture and product paths
Our take
Despite there being a broad choice of investment models, traders have not traditionally been able to invest in the outcomes of future events. Kalshi, as the first federally regulated exchange where users can invest, trade and essentially "bet" on future outcomes, sets out to change this.
The company has launched a unique asset class called "event contracts", where investors can buy simple yes or no contracts based on whether an event will happen or not. Since gaining federal regulation, Kalshi has begun adding expertise in key areas, hiring Google’s Phil Bogle as Director of Engineering and former Nadex CEO Timothy McDermott to the Board of Directors.
The key to the company's future will be maintaining trust with users through transparency, particularly on how more complex or ongoing ‘wagers’ are settled. The team has been backed with funding from Sequoia Capital, who have most likely gauged how valuable the opinion data collected on the site could be to market and political researchers - although the CFTC's reluctance to approve betting on US elections has presented a block in the road for Kalshi's plans to add "the outcome of congressional elections" to its asset options.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-16% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Jun 2025
$185m
LATE VC
Feb 2021
$30m
SERIES A
Total funding: $215.2m
Company benefits
- Work from home opportunities
Company HQ
SoHo, New York, NY
Leadership
Luana Lopes Lara
(Co-Founder)Studied Computer Science at MIT. Researcher at MIT in the Media Lab and later the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Worked as a Quantitative Trader at Five Rings Capital and Citadel Securities. Most recently she was a Researcher at the MIT Brain and Cognitive Science Centre.
Tarek Mansour
(Co-Founder)Studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Started off working in finance, as an Analyst at Audi Capital and Goldman Sachs. Was a Quantitative Trader twice at Five Rings Capital and Citadel Securities.
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