Tech Lead – Competitive Real-Time Platform | Match making | Los Angeles only

Building a competitive game layer on top of the stock market.

This is not trading.

This is not fintech dashboards.

This is a real-time competitive system where users predict performance and compete in simulated portfolio battles. Rankings, fairness, and correctness define the experience.

We are entering friend & family testing and preparing for MVP — and we are hiring the technical owner of the system.

Not a feature developer.

Not capacity expansion.

We are hiring the person responsible for the platform working.

🧠 What We’re Building

Two core competitive modes:

🎯 Pick’Em

Users predict relative performance between companies in structured matchups. Ranking integrity and scoring correctness are everything.

⚔️ Arena

Real-time simulated portfolio competitions. Rankings update continuously as markets move. This introduces live state transitions, pricing accuracy challenges, locking rules, ordering edge cases, and fairness constraints.

This behaves closer to a multiplayer competitive system than traditional fintech.

Correctness and consistency matter more than UI polish.

🎯 Your Mandate

You own technical behavior and direct engineering execution.

Your core responsibility:

Make the product reliable, evolvable, and fast to iterate.

You will:

• Design matchmaking and contest logic that behaves predictably under load
• Handle external market data/API inconsistencies and failure scenarios
• Prevent ranking and scoring disputes before they occur
• Remove blockers for the dev team and make system-level decisions
• Ship new features without breaking live competitions
• Stabilize performance during usage spikes
• Anticipate edge cases as real users compete
• Continuously refactor toward scale while MVP evolves

This role is proactive system ownership — not ticket implementation.

👤 Ideal Background

• 6–8+ years of engineering experience
• Previously owned live consumer systems with real users
• Comfortable making decisions in ambiguity
• Thinks in system behavior, not frameworks

Strong preference for experience in:

• Fantasy sports platforms
• Multiplayer games
• Prediction markets
• Simulated trading platforms
• Real-time leaderboards or ranking systems

Fintech experience is relevant only if you built behavioral systems — not reporting dashboards.

❌ Not a Fit If

• You primarily build CRUD SaaS apps
• You specialize only in infrastructure
• You lead with frameworks instead of system logic
• You prefer defined tickets over ambiguous ownership

🏆 What Success Looks Like

You become the technical authority who:

• Keeps the platform stable under competitive pressure
• Enables fast iteration without breaking live systems
• Makes architectural calls that reduce future risk
• Balances speed and correctness

Speed and adaptability are critical to this company’s success.

📍 Location

U.S. based required.

Los Angeles strongly preferred for close collaboration.

• If you’ve owned live, stateful, competitive systems — and you care about correctness under pressure — this is the kind of challenge that defines careers.