Founding Engineer

Job Description

We are partnering with a profitable, pe-backed company building systematic trading infrastructure for real-world markets.

Live events generate tens of billions of dollars annually in secondary ticket transactions, yet the market remains fragmented, inefficient, and largely driven by manual decision-making. Pricing is inconsistent, liquidity is uneven, and execution lacks the rigor seen in mature financial markets.

Our client is changing that.

Backed by an established brokerage with multiple years of track record and eight-figure annual revenue, they are building a technology-driven trading platform to bring discipline, liquidity, and intelligent pricing to this market.

This is not a typical marketplace.

This is a trading system... applied to real-world assets.

The Opportunity

As a Founding Engineer, you will architect and build the core systems that power valuation, capital deployment, and execution across secondary markets.

You will own the platform from first principles, including architecture, core services, and production performance, while working directly with the founder to translate strategy into real systems that deploy capital daily.

This role starts at the Staff / Principal IC level with a clear path into engineering leadership as the company scales.

What You’ll Own

• Design and build the core trading infrastructure powering pricing and execution
• Develop systems for valuation, order placement, and post-trade tracking
• Build and maintain data pipelines that ingest, normalize, and react to real-time market data
• Implement pricing logic informed by liquidity, demand signals, and historical performance
• Create monitoring systems, dashboards, and internal tooling for system health and performance
• Establish safeguards for data integrity, execution failures, and edge cases
• Partner directly with the founder to prioritize initiatives and run experiments
• Continuously improve system performance and decision-making through tight feedback loops

What We’re Looking For

• Proven experience building production systems in high-stakes environments
• (e.g., trading systems, fintech, marketplaces, pricing engines, ad tech, or similar)
• Strong backend and infrastructure expertise
• APIs and external integrations
• Relational databases (PostgreSQL or similar)
• Cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP)
• Proficiency in Python or Go preferred
• Deep experience building data pipelines that operate reliably under messy, real-world conditions
• Strong system design skills with a focus on performance, reliability, and scalability
• Entrepreneurial mindset with high ownership and bias toward action
• Ability to clearly communicate system behavior, tradeoffs, and constraints to non-technical stakeholders

Why This Role

• Direct ownership of a system that deploys real capital daily
• Opportunity to build trading infrastructure in an untapped asset class
• Work alongside a founder with an existing profitable foundation
• Influence both technical architecture and business strategy from day one
• Clear path into engineering leadership as the company grows