Software Engineer

WHAT IS KALSHI? Kalshi has defined a new category: prediction markets. Kalshi allows people to trade on the outcome of any events and turn any question about the future into a financial asset. Kalshi fought for years and legalized prediction markets in the US for the first time in history, is currently the fastest growing financial market in America, and has thousands of markets across politics, economics, financials, weather, tech, AI, culture and more. We believe prediction markets have the potential to be the largest financial market because they turn anything into a financial position. - Our vision: well… build the largest financial market on the planet. - Our mission: bring more truth to the world through the power of markets. Our culture is simple: we hire really talented people, work really hard, and enjoy the climb. We are looking for ambitious and exceptional people to join our (relatively small) team to help us build the next generation of financial markets. ROLE ROADMAP We’re hiring a backend engineer to help architect and scale the core systems that power Kalshi’s exchange. In this role, you will own critical components of our trading, clearing, and connectivity infrastructure. You’ll design high-performance systems that handle real-time order flow, margining, data distribution, and integrations with market makers, brokers, and institutional participants. You’ll play a key role in shaping Kalshi’s market structure and backend architecture, driving both greenfield development and major upgrades to existing systems. Because we are a small, senior engineering team, you’ll have deep ownership, broad technical scope, and direct impact on the stability, performance, and evolution of the platform. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Develop and optimize order matching engines, trade execution algorithms, and supporting data structures - Build high-performance market data feeds and trading APIs used by clients, brokers, and market makers - Design and maintain highly available clearing systems, including margining, collateral management, and banking integrations - Lead integrations with external market makers, brokers, hedge funds, and other institutional participants - Stress test large-scale, mission-critical systems to ensure robustness, reliability, and maintainability - Optimize internal algorithms, services, and database access patterns for maximum performance - Design and implement new market structures (scalars, futures, non-binaries, and more) - Work closely with users and partners—defining features, shipping products, and iterating quickly - Ship fast and with high quality, exercising strong judgment and independence - Make decisions autonomously in an environment with high ownership and minimal bureaucracy - As Kalshi grows, evolve your role while helping shape our engineering culture, systems, and product direction WHAT YOU BRING REQUIRED: - 4+ years of software engineering experience - Experience planning and leading large projects with meaningful long-term impact - Strong technical depth and ability to solve complex engineering problems end-to-end - Solid understanding of relational databases, transactions, and data modeling - Familiarity with building highly concurrent, distributed, or real-time systems - Track record of creating and improving development processes, tooling, and workflows - Excellent judgment in prioritization and ability to move quickly without sacrificing quality - Growth mindset with a steep trajectory and eagerness to learn - Deep care for the craft—you take ownership, obsess over quality, and hold a high bar - Ability to ship at high velocity BONUS: - Experience building financial systems, FIX protocols, clearing infrastructure, or broker connectivity - Proven success designing or scaling large distributed systems - Interest in working directly with customers or external partners NYC PAY TRANSPARENCY DISCLOSURE SALARY RANGE: $100,000 TO $250,000 ANNUALLY, PLUS EQUITY AND BENEFITS. This range is based on cu