Job Description

**Team**
We're a team of two founders building a brand new exchange. One of the
founders runs business and growth, the other finance, operations, and
regulatory strategy (with a background in institutional trading). We ran a
beta this past NFL season that pulled 1,000 organic users, and we're about to
raise our seed round now. We're looking for the founding engineer who owns the
entire technical build and becomes our CTO.

**Thesis**
FanShares is a stock market for athletes.
There's a huge group of sports fans who already think like investors. They
watch a rookie's first month and see a breakout before the market does. They
talk about players in the language of assets: exposure, ceiling, floor, buy
low. A sportsbook gives them a bet that dies Sunday night and bans them if
they win. Fantasy resets every week. Prediction markets expire at resolution.
Nothing lets a fan hold a position in an athlete's career and trade it.

**What we 're building**
A peer-to-peer exchange where fans buy and sell career-length positions in
individual athletes, priced continuously and settled against a rules-based
rating computed from official on-field stats. No house, no bookmaker taking
the other side. Fans trade against each other, every position is fully
collateralized, and we take a transaction fee.
In 2026 the CFTC approved the first US perpetual futures contract and named
individual athlete performance a permitted contract category in a federal
rulemaking. The regulatory door just opened. We launch under a proven
sweepstakes framework now, then register as a CFTC exchange, the same two-step
path that valued Novig at $500m.

**What you 'll own**
The core exchange: matching engine and order book, in Rust
The settlement and rating engine that scores athletes from official
performance data
The real-time data pipeline feeding live prices and settlement
Every architecture, latency, and build-vs-buy call, from launch through real-
money volume to CFTC-registered operation
The engineering team, as we grow it

**You might be a fit if you**
Are a builder first: you've shipped real, production systems independently and
ambiguity energizes you rather than blocks you
Have built correctness-critical, concurrent, stateful infrastructure at the
level of a trading system, exchange, or payments platform, even if you haven't
built a full exchange yet
Know Rust, or have deep systems experience in C++/Go and the range to pick
Rust up fast
Think in architectures and data models, not tickets: you want to own systems
end to end
Want to be the technical voice in the room, with investors and eventually
regulators, and are energized rather than daunted by two non-technical
founders who will lean on you completely
Care that this is real money and real markets, where "mostly correct" isn't
good enough

**Extra**
You won't be starting from a blank repo. There's a validated product and a
clear spec underneath this, but the production exchange is yours to architect
and build.
The best market infrastructure feels effortless to the user and is brutally
hard underneath. If designing the price-discovery layer for an entirely new
asset class is the kind of problem you want to live in, reach out.