Founding Engineer

Forge Sports is a quietly operating, product focused company building a new generation of B2B sports trading and exchange technology. We're still in stealth mode with very few external dependencies—just a small, highly technical founding group with significant industry experience. We're looking to move fast building a brand new product from scratch. The company is fully funded and has it's first client secured.

We're looking for a hands on Founding Engineer to own the initial build of our core trading platform and, as product traction grows, scale out and lead the engineering organisation that will follow.

In your first 12 months you will:

• Architect & implement low-latency, high-throughput services that underpin a modern sports betting stack (Golang will be the primary language, but you'll shape the stack).
• Set technical direction & standards: coding guidelines, CI/CD, observability, security, IaC—everything is green-field.
• Recruit, mentor & retain a world-class team. You'll design the hiring process, interview engineers, and establish an inclusive, high-performance culture from day one.
• Collaborate closely with the CTO and product stakeholders, translating commercial goals into an executable technical roadmap with realistic milestones.
• Stay pragmatic: roll up your sleeves to ship features, debug prod issues, and automate manual processes while the team is small.

• Hybrid by default – we have office space available to use for key meetings & whiteboard design sessions, but we're primarily remote
• Flexible hours – core overlap is 10:00-18:00 UK; outside that, manage your own schedule around project goals and life commitments.
• Autonomy, not red tape – minimum viable meetings; maximum ownership.

1. Intro call (30 min) – a brief screening call to give you more information about the role, answer your initial questions, and check your suitability
2. Technical deep dive (90 min) – with the CEO / COO: architecture discussion, code review and a chance to discuss the role more deeply with management
3. Collaborative design session (Full-day) – pair with our CTO on a realistic system problem; we focus on reasoning, not esoteric puzzles.
4. Final CEO interview (60 mins) - A focus more on softer skills, people management, hiring & recruiting

• Deep systems expertise: 7 + years building mission critical distributed systems (finance, gaming, telco, ad-tech, etc.) where throughput, correctness and availability are non-negotiable.
• Startup experience: Proven track record shipping products in small, fast moving teams; comfortable balancing hands‑on coding with hiring, roadmap shaping, and architectural oversight.
• Golang or equivalent: Delivered production systems in Go or another performant, strongly typed language (Rust, C/C++, Java, C# etc) and can demonstrate clear, idiomatic designs.
• Architecture & design: Able to reason about trade offs (latency vs. consistency, coupling vs. complexity) and produce clean, evolvable service boundaries.
• People leadership: 2 + years recruiting and leading engineers: coaching, performance reviews, setting career paths, driving healthy team rituals.
• Cloud & DevOps: Comfortable owning AWS environments, IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation), container orchestration (EKS/K8s), automated CI/CD.
• Observability & operability Designs include monitoring, tracing, alerting and graceful degradation from day one.
• Communication Crisp written & spoken English; able to explain low level details to engineers and strategic options to executives.

Nice to have

• Real time trading, market making or exchange experience.
• Experience taking a product from zero to "Version 1" in a start-up or internal venture.
• Formal CS degree from a top university or comparable open-source / entrepreneurial record.

• Competitive bonus scheme
• 10% matched pension contributions
• Private healthcare insurance
• Long term illness insurance
• Gym membership
• Choose your own hardware & setup for your development environment.