Senior Backend Engineer - Prediction Markets
New York City (in-office) | Full-time | $200k-$300k base + performance bonus
About Lhava
Lhava is a crypto-native trading and technology firm specializing in quantitative strategies, automated market making, and DeFi infrastructure. We are founder-owned, bootstrapped, and executing hundreds of millions in weekly trading volume across centralized and decentralized exchanges. Our team draws from top-tier trading firms, web3 ecosystems, and DeFi-native protocols.
Engineering at Lhava is small, moves fast, and operates at the intersection of financial risk and data reliability. We are expanding into prediction markets as a new business line, and this role will own the backend systems that make that expansion possible - built on the same Rust-first stack we use across our on-chain and off-chain data infrastructure, spanning EVM and SVM chains, centralized exchanges, and DeFi protocols.
The Role
You will design and build Lhava's prediction markets backend - the systems that ingest, price, and settle event-based markets across both on-chain (DeFi-native) and off-chain (CeFi-style) venues. This includes market data ingestion, orderbook and pricing infrastructure, resolution and settlement handling, and the data foundation needed to support quant strategies trading prediction markets alongside our existing books.
This is a systems engineering role first. You will be writing production Rust, making architecture decisions that affect downstream consumers across trading, risk, quant, and accounting, and operating what you build. The work is greenfield in direction but not in context - our existing data and trading infrastructure is live and in production, so new prediction markets systems must integrate cleanly with it rather than duplicate it.
Responsibilities
• Prediction markets data platform. Design and build the ingestion and pricing pipeline for prediction markets - covering market creation, orderbook/odds updates, volume, and open interest across venues such as Polymarket, Kalshi, and other on-chain or off-chain platforms.
• On-chain integration. Build and maintain integrations with on-chain prediction market protocols (via Alloy for EVM, and Solana for SVM), including market contracts, conditional token frameworks, and outcome/settlement events.
• CeFi / off-chain integration. Build and maintain connections to prediction market and exchange REST/WebSocket APIs for order placement, fills, and market data. Handle rate limiting, reconnection logic, and normalization across venues with very different market microstructures.
• Resolution and settlement. Design and implement systems that track market resolution, oracle outcomes, and settlement finality - ensuring positions and P&L update correctly and safely once a market resolves.
• Historical backfill and snapshotting. Design backfill and snapshotting mechanisms for historical prediction markets data to support compliance, reconciliation, and quant research into event-driven strategies.
• Data warehouse. Extend our data warehouse to serve prediction markets alongside existing trading data - supporting both near-real-time streaming and poll-based historical access as this business line grows.
• Reliability and observability. Own the operational health of the systems you build. Instrument ingestion and settlement pipelines, define SLAs for data freshness and settlement correctness, and give downstream consumers visibility into data quality.
Requirements
• Strong production Rust experience - async, concurrent, and systems-level. You write idiomatic Rust and hold the team to that standard.
• Experience building high-throughput, low-latency data ingestion pipelines from external APIs and event streams.
• Familiarity with EVM or SVM chain data: RPC calls, ABI/IDL decoding, transaction and event parsing.
• Experience with PostgreSQL or ClickHouse at production scale, including schema design, query optimization, and time-series workloads (TimescaleDB or similar).
• Understanding of streaming vs. polling data architectures and when to apply each.
• Ability to design for rate limiting, backpressure, and partial failure across external integrations.
• Comfort reasoning about settlement and resolution logic where correctness has direct financial consequences - e.g. oracle-based outcomes, conditional payouts, or similar event-driven settlement mechanics.
• Track record shipping and operating backend systems in production with direct business consequences - financial services, trading, or similar.
• Strong communication skills. You will work across engineering, quant, and non-technical stakeholders and will need to explain architecture decisions and data reliability tradeoffs clearly.
Nice to Have
• Direct experience with prediction market platforms (Polymarket, Kalshi, Manifold, or similar) or conditional token / outcome-token frameworks.
• Experience with both EVM and SVM ecosystems.
• Familiarity with centralized exchange APIs (Binance, Bybit, Hyperliquid, or similar).
• Experience designing data lake or data warehouse architectures at scale.
• Background in crypto or financial services where data correctness has direct P&L consequences.
• Exposure to DeFi protocols: AMMs, CLMMs, lending markets, or perps.
Why Lhava
• Ground-floor impact. The systems you build will be the foundation for a new business line at the firm, with direct exposure to founders and firm-wide visibility into your work.
• Flat, founder-led team. Decisions move fast, and you will have direct access to founders and firm-wide visibility into your work.
• Hard technical problems. Heterogeneous on-chain and off-chain data, rate-limited external sources, novel settlement mechanics, and real-time and historical consumers with different consistency requirements - this is genuinely difficult engineering.
• Competitive compensation. $200k-$300k base plus performance-based bonus.
Benefits: majority-covered healthcare with fully covered vision and dental, 401(k), free lunch and dinner in-office, all-expenses-paid offsites, and additional perks to support your work and life.
