River Markets - Founding Engineer - San Francisco, CA
About The Position
River Markets is building the prime brokerage and execution layer for prediction markets, providing the infrastructure professional and institutional traders need to access, trade, and manage risk across venues like Kalshi and Polymarket at scale. The company values ownership, speed, and a high technical bar, aiming to achieve more with fewer people. Their operating model is AI-native, with every engineer expected to use AI tooling for coding, workflow automation, and building internal systems. They are looking for individuals who instinctively reach for automation and are excited by the potential for uncapped leverage per engineer, while still maintaining a deep understanding of all shipped code.
Requirements
- Strong engineer (at least 2 YOE -full time- in SWE or similar role) who has designed, shipped, and operated production systems, not just written features, but kept them alive.
- Fluency in a modern language (Python, Go, Rust, or similar) and comfort across the stack: backend services, data pipelines, and user-facing components.
- Solid grounding in system design, API design, and data modeling for low-latency, scalable applications.
- AI-native by default, you already automate your own work and use AI tooling to ship more, faster.
- Thrives in a small, high-ownership environment with minimal oversight.
- Someone nice (we’ll spend a lot of time together) :).
Nice To Haves
- Experience in fintech, trading, or market infrastructure.
- A genuine interest in prediction markets.
Responsibilities
- Build and maintain the systems behind our order book, execution stack, exchange connectivity and portfolio management.
- Integrate with external exchanges and APIs where reliability and latency matter.
- Write high-quality, testable code and raise the bar on everyone else's through review.
- Improve infrastructure, reliability, and observability so we can move fast without breaking our systems.
- Help define our engineering culture, standards, and early hiring, you're setting the defaults the next ten engineers inherit.
Benefits
- Base salary: $140,000–$200,000
- Equity: 0.5%–1.5%
- On-site in the San Francisco Bay Area
- Platinum health insurance plan, we cover 100% of the premium
- Unlimited PTO (minimum of 3 weeks, we don’t want a burned out team)
- Food provided in office
- Dog Friendly office
- Fresh fruits + snacks from farmer markets and local shops
- Monthly team building activity
- 401(k) match fully vested
- We sponsor visas.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Entry Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
