The Team Map
Kalshi did not just launch a product. It forced a new asset class into existence. After years of litigation, the company won federal recognition for event contracts, becoming the first regulated prediction market in U.S. history. That victory created a hiring problem: every function now operates inside a regulatory perimeter that didn't exist three years ago, while scaling a marketplace the company calls the fastest-growing financial market in America.
This guide maps who Kalshi hires and onto which teams, what the compensation looks like, how the hiring process works and what candidates need to succeed, where the work is performed, and which personal traits lead to long‑term success at the firm.
The team reflects that tension. Kalshi lists 42 open roles across eleven functions. Engineering holds seven — Data Scientist (Product), Infrastructure Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer, Software Engineer Frontend, Software Engineer Mobile, Software Engineer Product, and Software Engineer Trading Platform — with heavy emphasis on low-latency order routing and market-data infrastructure. Product carries three openings: Product Manager Growth, Product Manager Payments, and UX Researcher. Design has three slots: Growth Designer, Policy Brand Designer, and Product Designer. UX Researcher sits at $180–275k and reports into Product, not Marketing, a signal that discovery work is treated as a core trading-surface concern.
Growth is the largest bucket at ten roles. The breakdown reveals where Kalshi sees its next liquidity: a Perps-focused growth lead, a GTM-AI specialist, a GTM-Healthcare lead, a Creative Ops Producer, a Lifecycle Marketer, a Linear/Streaming Lead, a Performance Marketing - Google role, a Perps Content Marketer, a TV Buyer, and a Video Producer. Policy & Business Development carries five openings, including a Perps Sales Lead and a State (Regional, West) hire. Compliance holds four. Finance (three roles), People/Talent (two), Risk (one), Research (one), and Support (three) round out the board. Compliance and Policy & Business Development combined headcount nearly equals engineering.
Compliance owns the transaction-monitoring program end to end: alerting frameworks, investigation workflows, escalation standards, and the documentation examiners will audit. Policy & Business Development runs the licensing docket: "complex licensing and regulatory initiatives end-to-end across new products, jurisdictions, and regulated business lines," per the Compliance Licensing & Strategic Initiatives posting. That role carries a $150–250k, the Compliance Licensing posting reports, base plus equity, with a mandate that explicitly includes "high-priority strategic compliance initiatives as Kalshi's business and regulatory footprint expand."
The Recruiter seat is priced at $175–250k. Thirty-eight of the forty-two roles are anchored to the New York office; four are marked remote.
Pay Runs High
Kalshi's compensation sits well above the median for early-stage fintech, and the firm's own job board makes that visible in concrete bands. Seventeen salaried roles show a total-compensation range of $71,000 to $277,000, with a median of $250,000. Every figure below reflects base salary plus any potential equity and bonus, as the board lists total-comp bands, and Levels.fyi confirms its reported numbers include base, stock, and bonuses.
Six current postings on the Zero G Talent board illustrate the spread for New York-based roles:
| Role | Total-comp band (USD/year) |
|---|---|
| Software Engineer, Product | 200,000 – 280,000 |
| Software Engineer, Trading Platform | 200,000 – 280,000 |
| UX Researcher | 180,000 – 275,000 |
| Product Manager, Payments | 170,000 – 270,000 |
| Product Designer | 180,000 – 270,000 |
| Recruiter | 175,000 – 250,000 |
These bands cluster tightly in the $170k–$280k window, Zero G Talent's board data shows, consistent with the board's $250k median. Third-party aggregators show wider divergence. Levels.fyi (August 2026) reports a $200k low end for Software Engineer and a $254.8k high for People Operations at the "Common Range Average" level, with a $227.4k median across its sample. HireOven, drawing on 49 posted U.S. roles, puts the median at roughly $175,000, the interquartile range at $130k–$190k, and the full posted spread at $20k–$300k. Salary.com's August 2026 survey of U.S. employees yields an average of $109,689 and a typical range of $96,208–$124,292, figures that skew lower because they weight base-heavy individual-contributor roles and pre-date the board's most recent senior listings.
The gap between sources is instructive. Levels.fyi and the Zero G Talent board both capture total-comp packages for roles that carry meaningful equity; HireOven's wider spread reflects a mix of cash-only and equity-inclusive postings; Salary.com's average reflects incumbent employees, not open-market offers. Kalshi's own board is the freshest signal, representing live, negotiable bands for roles the company is actively filling in its New York office.
Actual offers vary by level, location, and negotiation, as HireOven notes. Department matters too: Salary.com confirms salaries often differ between departments at Kalshi due to varying market demand for specific skill sets and the nature of the roles. Experience level is another lever. All figures cited here are pre-tax.
How the Loop Works
Kalshi's interview process sits at a reported 5.2 out of 10 difficulty based on 14 candidate reports compiled by Dataford, with Glassdoor reviewers similarly rating it "medium" across 14 reviews. But the aggregate masks meaningful variation by function, and a handful of candidates describe disorganization, including missed scheduled interviews, that the company's public materials don't address.
The loop structure is role-specific. Customer Support candidates face four rounds: a communication screen evaluating spoken clarity and listening, a live scenario or role-play with an angry or tricky query, a behavioural round on past support experience and pressure handling, and a process-and-tools round covering CRM, ticketing, SLAs, and metrics. Software Engineers also move through four stages: a timed online assessment on HackerRank or HackerEarth (arrays, strings, hashing), one or two live coding rounds on data structures, algorithms, and complexity analysis, a system-design session (scalable service for mid/senior, low-level design for early-career), and a hiring-manager conversation on past projects, ownership, and team fit. UI/UX Designers present a portfolio walkthrough of two to three case studies, complete a live or take-home design exercise, demonstrate Figma proficiency and design-system fluency, and finish with a collaboration-and-behavioural round focused on working with product managers and engineers.
Data roles follow a heavier technical gauntlet. Dataford's breakdown shows coding screens and efficiency analysis (time/space complexity) at 100% and 96% prevalence respectively, with product analytics (96%), algorithms (92%), machine learning (92%), data structures (88%), and statistical modeling (88%) rounding out the core. Live coding appears in 81% of reported loops; model evaluation and validation in 80%.
The first-party board lists a Recruiter role at $175k–$250k.
Office Gravity
Kalshi's primary physical presence is its Manhattan office, which serves as the anchor for a team that has grown to roughly 224 people as of 2025. The company was founded in San Francisco in 2018 by Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, but the operation migrated to New York City ahead of its July 2021 public launch. The BuiltInNYC profile lists 203 total employees and identifies the location as New York, NY, while first-party board data from Zero G Talent shows every recent salaried posting tagged "New York Office": Software Engineer, Product; Software Engineer, Trading Platform; UX Researcher; Product Manager, Payments; Product Designer; and Recruiter.
The office itself is not described in public sources with square-footage counts or amenity lists, but the work conducted there reveals its purpose. Engineers on the trading platform team build and maintain the matching engine that processes binary, yes-or-no event contracts, which saw weekly volumes of about 1 million contracts as early as November 2021 and, by the 2026 FIFA World Cup, absorbed over $1.2 billion in a single market. Product managers and designers iterate on the interfaces that retail and institutional traders use to hedge recession risk, bet on congressional control, or wager on NFL outcomes (sports now drive more than 90% of site activity and 89% of 2025 revenue). Legal and compliance staff operate in New York given the sustained regulatory litigation that has defined Kalshi's existence since 2022. The litigation has forced geo-blocking in Nevada, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Washington, Wisconsin, Arizona, and New York.
Company materials describe a "remote work program, remote‑eligible roles, and a flexible hybrid model that enable location flexibility," and FlexJobs confirms that 100% remote work has been offered in accounting & finance, analyst, computer & IT, legal, and software development categories. No secondary office appears in the research. The San Francisco origin story is historical, not operational. The board data's consistent "New York Office" tag across 17 salaried roles reinforces that Manhattan remains the single designated workspace for anyone choosing to work on-site.
Who Stays
The signal cuts through the noise in two numbers: 4.0 out of 5 for career growth on Blind, and 2.0 out of 5 for work‑life balance. The company's own mantra — "It's Yours, Make it Work" — appears in BuiltIn's culture breakdown as the organizing principle for accountability. One early employee described the team on Blind in May 2022 as "hustlers" who "go above and beyond to make stuff happen," calling the product "very interesting" and the team "smart" and "willing to try anything." That willingness maps directly to the business: Kalshi created a new asset class, event contracts, and became the first CFTC‑regulated exchange for broad‑category event trading.
Glassdoor data reinforces the pattern. Eighty percent of reviewers would recommend the firm to a friend. Culture and values sit at 4.2, career opportunities at 4.4. The overall rating of 4.4 across 27 reviews places Kalshi within one standard deviation of the finance‑industry average. The Blind work‑life score of 2.0 tells the rest of the story. The founders are first‑time founders, per the same Blind thread, and they are learning to manage expectations in real time.
The hiring language on Kalshi's own site distills it further: "We keep things simple: hire great people, work hard, and enjoy the journey." The first‑party board data shows roles clustered at the top of the market — software engineers at $200k–$280k, Zero G Talent's board reports, product managers at $170k–$270k, Zero G Talent's figures put, a UX researcher at $180k–$275k, according to Zero G Talent's board. The New York office — where every current board posting is based — puts legal, product, engineering, and operations in the same location. Career growth scores highest because the organization is still small enough that scope expands with contribution. The 2.0 work‑life rating reflects the trade-off: people who need guardrails, predictable hours, or a mature management layer self‑select out. The ones who remain are the ones who watched a startup force a new asset class into existence and decided to build the next one.
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