Backend Engineer (Core)

What we're up to

Kalshi is the first and only federally regulated exchange where people can trade on any event. Think like the NYSE, but instead of trading stocks, you trade on the events you know and care about. Kalshi has more than 500 markets across politics, economics, financials, weather, tech, AI, culture and more.

After three years of regulatory struggle, Kalshi's historic regulatory approval from the CFTC has allowed it to launch a new asset class: event contracts. Event contracts, the fastest-growing asset class today, are elegant financial instruments structured as simple yes/no questions about the future.

Kalshi's vision is to build the next-generation financial ecosystem for trading what we believe will be the largest asset class of all. Kalshi's vision is bold. We're on a long journey in uncharted territories. We are looking for passionate and outlier members excited to embark on this voyage toward building the financial system's next inflection point.

Role Roadmap

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.

Some of the things you'll be building and working on:

• 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.

About You

• 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)

Bonus points

• Experience building financial systems, FIX API, clearing infrastructure, broker connectivity, etc.
• Proven experience building large-scale systems
• Like to interact directly with customers.

NYC Pay Transparency Disclosure:

Salary Range: $100,000 to $200,000 annually plus equity and benefits.

This salary range is based on the current available market data and represents the expected salary range for this role. Kalshi has minimal hierarchy and few titles, but a broad range of experience is represented within roles. Should you have compensation expectations that exceed these bands, we'd love to hear from you and would welcome you to reach out to discuss further.

Our Culture

We are a group of people who work hard and get stuff done. Meritocracy is at our core, and we value people who take ownership and figure (usually hard) things out. We dream big and climb the steeper mountain. We love our craft deeply and are proud of what we put out in the world. We are committed to our vision of an improved financial ecosystem and our mission of bringing more truth to the world through the power of markets.

Kalshians are, by far, Kalshi's largest asset: we pick our teammates carefully, but once we pick our teammates, we trust them deeply.