Founding Engineer / CTO

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.