The team shape
A sports betting exchange that calls its mission "challenge the house" doesn't hire the way a traditional sportsbook does. The question isn't whether you know odds — it's whether you can build, operate, and grow a marketplace where the house doesn't exist.
Founded in 2021 and now approximately 55 people strong, Novig lists 13 open positions across seven functions, including marketing, software, customer success, and supporting operations, with a median salary of $140k and roughly 38% of roles offered remotely or in hybrid arrangements. Operations carries the heaviest load: Customer Experience Specialist (seasonal), Developer Relations Engineer, Finance Operations Associate, Fraud Specialist, and Head of Customer Experience. Marketing follows with two roles: Head of Social (Growth) and Performance Marketing Manager, Display & CTV, plus a contract Chief Fan Officer role. Tech has two: Software Engineer and IT Specialist. Design, Growth, Markets, and Regulatory & Compliance each hold one. Twelve are full-time.
Ten roles sit in New York. Two are fully remote. One role, Market Operations Specialist, asks for remote candidates who can reach the NYC area. The distribution mirrors a company that still builds around a physical office while admitting certain functions can operate elsewhere.
The founders' backgrounds explain the weighting. Kelechi Ukah architected the core infrastructure after quantitative trading at Jane Street and high-energy physics research at CERN. Jacob Fortinsky runs strategy, operations, product, capital, and regulatory after investment banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Together they raised over $105M, Novig's careers page reported. A founding pair with that mix — hard technical depth on one side, capital-markets and regulatory fluency on the other, naturally staffs Operations heavily. The exchange runs on market integrity, fraud prevention, and customer trust; those are operational problems first, marketing problems second.
The values page makes the same point in different language. "User First, Always" and "Truth Over Ego" read like operating principles for a team that touches real money and real regulators daily. "Move Fast, Think Long" describes a shipping cadence that still has to survive compliance review. "Challenge The House" is the recruiting pitch: come build the thing that replaces the model you've watched limit winning players.
Posted salary bands range up to $200K–$260K for the Software Engineer, with a median around $140K across the 13 salaried roles. Operations roles cluster in the $130K–$180K band. Marketing leadership sits at $150K–$180K (Head of Social) and $160K–$200K (Lead Brand Designer). The Chief Fan Officer contract carries a wide $100K–$300K range, reflecting its hybrid creator-operator brief.
What the postings don't show is how those bands translate to actual offers, where equity fits, and what the interview loop tests for. But the team composition is already legible: a New York–anchored, operations-heavy, engineering-backed exchange that hires for market integrity first and brand noise second.
What the numbers show
| Role | Location | Salary band (USD/year) |
|---|---|---|
| Chief Fan Officer | Remote / Remote (US) | 100,000 – 300,000 |
| Software Engineer | New York | 200,000 – 260,000 |
| Lead Brand Designer | New York | 160,000 – 200,000 |
| Head of Customer Experience | New York / Remote (US) | 140,000 – 180,000 |
| Developer Relations Engineer | New York | 130,000 – 180,000 |
| Head of Social | New York | 150,000 – 180,000 |
Seven posted roles lack public bands: Performance Marketing Manager (Display & CTV), Fraud Specialist, Regulatory Chief of Staff, Market Operations Specialist, Customer Experience Specialist (Seasonal), IT Specialist, and one additional role not named in the feed. The seasonal customer-experience role is hourly — $25/hr at 40 hours a week, overtime eligible, and includes 100% health-premium coverage, paid holidays, paid sick and safe leave, and a 401(k) with company match. That package is unusually complete for a seasonal contract and signals Novig treats frontline support as a core function, not a cost center.
Equity is granted to every employee regardless of role. Health premiums are covered 100% for the employee; dental and vision are 99% covered. The 401(k) carries a 4% company match. Office-based staff receive a $27 daily lunch stipend and a $35 dinner stipend after 6:30 p.m., line items that add roughly $8,000 annually for someone in the Union Square office five days a week. A flexible time-off policy rounds out the cash-equivalent benefits.
Inside the interview loop
Public information on Novig's interview process is limited. Glassdoor hosts two anonymous interview reviews with two questions total. The company's careers page does not publish a stage-by-stage breakdown. Candidates should prepare for a process typical of a 50-person frontier-tech company: initial screen, technical assessment, and conversations with future teammates and leadership.
One office, a remote tier
The concentration of product-facing and brand-facing roles in New York suggests the office serves as a collaboration center for teams that benefit from high-bandwidth, in-person iteration. Core product development and the technical bridge to external developers are housed there. Creative and audience-facing leadership, including brand design and social, sit in the same location, pointing to a deliberate co-location of brand, design, and community functions. The Head of Customer Experience appears in a hybrid New York / Remote configuration, signaling that customer-success leadership may split time between the office and distributed team management.
The Chief Fan Officer role — banded at $100K–$300K and listed as fully remote, stands apart. Its wide band and remote-only designation suggest a senior, possibly executive-adjacent position focused on community strategy and fan engagement that does not require daily physical presence.
No role lists a location outside New York and the generic "Remote (US)" label. This implies Novig operates a single primary site, Union Square, NYC, rather than a multi-office footprint. For candidates, the practical read is straightforward: if you are applying for engineering, design, developer relations, social, or brand leadership, plan on a New York commute or relocation. If you are targeting customer-experience leadership or community-focused senior roles, a hybrid or fully remote arrangement is on the table. The board data does not disclose office amenities, lease terms, or whether the space is owned, subleased, or coworking; those details would require direct inquiry or an on-site visit.
The profile that fits
The hiring record Novig has built since 2021 tells a coherent story about the profile it rewards, if you know how to read it. It signals a business that sells directly to a passionate user base, relies on technical credibility to win developers, and treats brand as a product surface, not a marketing afterthought.
Look at the titles. "Chief Fan Officer" is not a standard corporate slot. It exists because Novig has a community that behaves like a fandom, and the company needs someone who speaks that language natively. The same impulse shows up in "Head of Social" and "Lead Brand Designer." These are not support functions; they are product-adjacent roles that shape how the company presents itself to the people who actually use it. Candidates who have built audiences, managed community programs, or translated technical products into cultural signal will recognize the brief. People who think of brand as a style guide will not.
The engineering side tells a parallel story. The "Software Engineer" role sits at the top of the band, and "Developer Relations Engineer" carries a salary that rivals many pure backend roles. That pricing says two things: the core product is technically demanding, and the company needs engineers who can explain it to other engineers without a translator. A developer-relations hire who has never shipped production code will struggle here; a backend engineer who cannot write a blog post or run a workshop will be underutilized. The overlap is the target.
Customer experience follows the same logic. The "Head of Customer Experience" role spans a band near the company median, and the location flexibility suggests the function is mature enough to operate distributed; but the New York anchor means the leader still sits close to product and brand decisions. Novig appears to treat support as a source of product insight, not a cost center to offshore. People who have built feedback loops between support tickets and roadmap priorities will fit; people who optimize for handle time will not.
Compensation bands reinforce the seniority expectation. Every role listed here clusters in the upper half of the board's range. Novig is not hiring juniors into these slots. It is buying experience that can operate with limited process, as a 55-person company has no room for hand-holding. The "Lead" and "Head" prefixes appear repeatedly. Even the Developer Relations Engineer role, which at some companies is an entry point, carries a $130K floor. The message: show up with a portfolio of shipped work, owned outcomes, and evidence you have operated without a playbook.
What the board cannot show, because no first-party employee testimonials or internal surveys are in the data, is the day-to-day texture. But the hiring pattern is a proxy. Novig selects for people who treat their craft as a communication problem as much as a technical one, who have built things that required convincing strangers to care, and who can move between a design review, a support escalation, and a community Discord without switching personas. The company's own record selects for range. If your resume only shows depth in a single lane, the fit is unlikely — not because the culture rejects specialists, but because the org chart does not have enough seats for them.
Working in frontier tech? Zero G Talent tracks the openings: see every open Novig role, browse frontier tech jobs, the companies hiring, and the people building the field.