Kalshi

Kalshi is a federally regulated financial exchange that allows investors to trade directly on the anticipated outcome of future events.

Ny, sf

26 - 50 employees

11 - 25 engineers

$25m - $50m funding

Series a

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Kalshi is a federally regulated financial exchange that allows investors to trade directly on the anticipated outcome of future events. Kalshi’s markets cover a wide range of topics including economics, international affairs, media and entertainment, climate/weather, and public health. Because Kalshi’s market topics can be more specific than other instruments like stocks or bonds, investors can get direct exposure to the events and trends that they are interested in. For example, a Kalshi market on whether a certain free trade agreement will be signed can help retail investors get exposure to emerging markets and fluctuations in international trade. Website: https://kalshi.com

Why join us?

You'll have impact on the whole company (engineering, product, hiring, setting the culture, etc), a lot of ownership and responsibility over the tech stack, and be one of the core people in the company, working directly with the founding team. Kalshi has very challenging tech problems in infrastructure, performance, ML, product, UX etc., and you get to work on basically any (or all!) of them.
We're the first federally regulated exchange dedicated to trading directly on the outcome of events. This gives us a huge regulatory moat (a competitor will need at least a year and a half to launch). We are in a winner-takes-all market, and this first-mover advantage allows us to build liquidity/network effects.
MIT founding team with a lot of finance (Citadel, Bridgewater, Five Rings, Goldman Sachs) and tech (Palantir) experience.

Engineering at Kalshi

Engineering team and processes

We work on 2-week sprints, which come after a comprehensive sprint planning meeting where all engineers update the team on progress and discuss next steps.

We are still small, so the engineering team intentionally does not have a lot of hierarchy or structure - our engineers take full ownership of the products they're building, from design all the way to deployment. The whole team is there to help and encourage though :)

Technical Challenges

Backend -> we're building a regulated exchange so you can imagine a backend similar to a modern, tech-enabled version of the NYSE and the challenges that come from that (performance, reliability, robustness, etc.) Product -> our goal is to make trading accessible and easy to understand for retail users, so distilling the information and making the interface simple is core (somewhat similar to Robinhood in that regards) Monitoring systems -> we are building surveillance systems that sit on top of the exchange to monitor the markets and participants' behavior. We're developing state-of-the-art ML/stats models to detect insider trading, spoofing, excessive speculation, and other fraudulent activities (Fun fact: a ton of the older exchanges still use excel spreadsheets for this).

Projects you might work on

Developing and producing a data-driven financial exchange (think a modern version of the NYSE) including work on our matching and trade execution engines (with a focus on performance and robustness).
Real-time detection/flagging systems for suspicious activity related to insider trading, market manipulation and other fraudulent behaviors.
Building a performant trading API (similar to Coinbase-pro's API) for automated trading.
Working on an easy-to-understand trading interface and iterating with market participants to build a platform fit for them.
Analyzing user behaviors and designing new features or iterations for the product.

Tech stack

React

Python

Working at Kalshi

We are a group of people who work hard and get things done, and we're looking for more people like that! :) Meritocracy is at our core, and we value people who take ownership and figure (usually hard) things out - we don't care much about anything other than the product of your work. We have all become close friends and we think of Kalshi as a type of a family bound together by our mission: we believe that this is the best (and most fun!) way to work.

Diversity and Inclusion

Connect with our team during your hiring process

As part of our commitment to an inclusive workplace, we are happy to offer prospective engineers the chance to connect with our engineering employees who come from underrepresented backgrounds. It’s a way to get a better sense of our team and what it might be like to work with us.

If you’re interested in connecting with our team, be sure to bring this up during one of our introductory calls!

Perks & benefits

Generous Vacation

We believe number of days off is something that people can decide for themselves. What matters is productivity and quality of work!