The Rhythm Inside the Room
Novig secured the fastest CFTC market designation in U.S. history with 76 people, 23 in product and engineering, BuiltIn's data shows. The founder-led team runs on direct ownership and fast execution; that operating culture produces a distinctive work environment and filters aggressively for a narrow candidate profile.
The hybrid model asks for four days a week in the New York office, a rhythm that keeps collaboration tactile. Slack and Google Hangouts handle the asynchronous layer; the tech stack (Rust, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Redis, Terraform on AWS) reflects a team that chooses boring reliability for infrastructure and modern tooling for velocity.
Decision-making authority sits with Jacob Fortinsky, the CEO and co-founder who has been the public face of the company's sharpest turns. When the Sydney Sweeney campaign detonated across sports Twitter in September 2026, Fortinsky went on record the same week, defending the creative choice and framing the backlash as predictable noise from critics who "predate this campaign." Sweeney herself described the collaboration as unusual for a brand deal: "I don't like to just put my face on something. I really want to be able to get into the weeds of it with an amazing team. And I got to meet the Novig team. Jacob's incredible, and I believed in him as a founder."
The organizational chart is flat by necessity. With roughly one product or engineering hire for every three total employees, specialization is a luxury. The Developer Relations Engineer role exists because the product is technical enough to need a translator for the trading community.
The CFTC designation ("fastest of its kind in US history" per the company) arrived from a compact group that treated the application as a product launch. The same muscle memory turned a controversial ad into a 400–4,000% traffic spike and an App Store jump from #50 to #11 in days, Warrior Saints' transcript shows.
The trade-off is visible in the hiring slate. Open roles (Head of Social, Lead Brand Designer, Head of Customer Experience) signal a company building external-facing muscle while the core product team stays small.
Five Principles That Drive the Build
Jacob Fortinsky, Novig's co-founder and CEO, has articulated the company's operating principles across a handful of public appearances, most extensively in a March 2026 interview on the Bet The Process podcast. The principles he describes map directly to the company's regulatory posture, its product roadmap, and the hiring signals that appear on job boards. They also appear on the careers page as four stated values: "User First, Always," "Truth Over Ego," "Move Fast, Think Long," "Challenge The House."
Laser focus on sports betting as the wedge. Fortinsky frames it as a deliberate zag: "Our competitors zig, we zag. They're all focused on creating markets on any question you have, whereas we're trying to disrupt and improve on a market that already exists — sports betting." In practice, this means Novig does not chase general-purpose prediction markets (politics, culture, economics) the way Kalshi or Polymarket do. The product roadmap stays anchored to NFL, NBA, MLB, and college sports, the verticals where liquidity already exists and where a peer-to-peer exchange can undercut the vig charged by traditional sportsbooks. The company's public tagline — "America's #1 sports prediction market. Trade peer-to-peer with no house edge and better prices than sportsbooks odds. CFTC-regulated. Live nationwide." — reflects that positioning verbatim.
Price and product as the only durable moats. Fortinsky reduces the competitive argument to two variables: "What makes Novig great and distinguishes it is price, you have the best prices on things, and product, the user experience, the interface is excellent." This dictates engineering priority. The order book, the matching engine, and the mobile app receive the bulk of engineering cycles. Features that do not directly improve price discovery or reduce friction for a bettor placing a $50 wager on a Sunday NFL slate are deprioritized. The company's shift to a CFTC-licensed Designated Contract Market (announced in 2026 with the note that "contracts govern all trades on our platform, replacing the market rules that previously applied") is the regulatory expression of the same principle: a regulated exchange structure lets Novig offer true peer-to-peer pricing without a house edge, which is the price advantage Fortinsky cites.
Speed of shipping as a cultural metric. Fortinsky states it plainly: "The reason why we believe we'll win in this space is because we've proven, I think, we have the best product, the best team, and that we ship products faster than our competitors do." On a team of 76, shipping velocity is a function of low coordination overhead, the founder-led structure Section 1 describes. The result, per Fortinsky, is 5× volume growth, though he did not specify the time window.
Long-horizon independence over exit. Asked about acquisition interest, Fortinsky replied: "I'd say no. I'd respectfully decline… we're not interested in selling." He frames the trajectory in growth-curve terms: "Our intercept may be a little bit lower than some of our competitors, but we think our slope is higher, and two or three years from now we'll be the largest sports betting company in the country." That stance filters candidates: equity-heavy compensation bands only make sense if the holder believes in a multi-year independent build, not a quick flip.
Regulatory legitimacy as a product feature, not a compliance checkbox. Novig pursued DCM designation from the CFTC and a Memorandum of Understanding with Major League Baseball (made public March 19, 2026) before scaling nationally. That sequence — license first, volume second — is unusual in consumer fintech and signals a founder team willing to absorb slower early growth for structural durability. It also shapes hiring: the open Head of Customer Experience and Developer Relations Engineer roles both sit at the intersection of product and regulatory operations.
What these principles look like day to day is a team that says no to entire product categories (general prediction markets), treats regulatory milestones as product launches, and compensates in a way that aligns only with a multi-year independent outcome. The principles are inferred from founder statements and the observable choices those statements predict.
The Bar the Hiring Funnel Sets
The interview process at Novig is not widely documented (Glassdoor shows only two anonymous interview reviews and two posted questions as of this writing), but the company's public materials, founder backgrounds, and the composition of its open roles collectively signal a clear filter.
Start with the founders. Kelechi Ukah, who leads technical vision and architected the core platform, spent time at Jane Street and CERN as a Herchel Smith Fellow, with a Harvard degree in Physics and Mathematics. Jacob Fortinsky, who runs strategy, operations, product, capital formation, and regulatory engagement, came from investment banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and studied Social Studies at Harvard. Their shared origin — meeting over poker at Harvard — is not incidental. The company they built is a peer-to-peer sports prediction market, CFTC-regulated, that positions itself as an exchange rather than a sportsbook. The domain demands fluency in market microstructure, risk management, and regulatory nuance.
The open roles reinforce the picture. The Tech roles command the highest bands (Software Engineer at $200,000–$260,000, Developer Relations Engineer at $130,000–$180,000), while the Lead Brand Designer sits at $160,000–$200,000 and Head of Social at $150,000–$180,000, Zero G Talent's figures put. Operations roles cluster lower (Fraud Specialist listed at $65,000–$75,000 on LinkedIn; Customer Experience Specialist seasonal at $25/hour on the careers page), but the spread signals a team that pays for specialized technical and brand talent while keeping operational execution lean.
| Role | Base Salary Range |
|---|---|
| Software Engineer | $200k–$260k |
| Lead Brand Designer | $160k–$200k |
| Head of Social | $150k–$180k |
| Head of Customer Experience | $140k–$180k |
| Developer Relations Engineer | $130k–$180k |
| Fraud Specialist | $65k–$75k |
| CX Specialist (seasonal) | $25/hr |
The stated operating principles (those four values) function as a cultural filter. "Challenge The House" is a mission signal: the company is explicitly built to disrupt legacy sportsbooks that limit winning players.
Equity structure matters too. Novig advertises "meaningful equity for every employee, regardless of role." The compensation mix (high base for technical roles, meaningful equity across the board, 100% health premiums covered, 4% 401(k) match) attracts people who are betting on the company's outcome.
The hybrid footprint (10 New York roles, two remote, one remote-with-NYC-preference) also shapes the bar. The office culture (daily $27 lunch and $35 dinner stipends, team ski days, after-hours soccer) is built around in-person density. The two Tech roles are New York-only; the Developer Relations Engineer role, also New York, suggests the company wants its technical advocates close to the product and regulatory teams.
In sum, Novig's hiring bar selects for: quantitative or regulatory fluency relevant to a peer-to-peer exchange; a track record of shipping in constrained, high-trust environments; comfort with direct ownership and minimal hierarchy; and mission alignment with disrupting the sportsbook model. The filter is narrow by design.
What the Reviews Actually Show
The public review record for Novig is thin but consistent in its broad strokes. Glassdoor lists 24 reviews under the name "Novigi" (a likely variant or earlier spelling) with an aggregate rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars, a signal that most contributors describe an excellent working experience. Indeed shows a 4.0 average across just two reviews. Both platforms invite current and former employees to rate culture, compensation, work-life balance, management, job security, and benefits, but neither surface the verbatim text of those reviews in the data accessible here. The SimplyHired company page mirrors the Indeed summary and adds a link to "Reviews from Novig employees on those same topics," though the underlying narratives remain behind a login wall.
What does come through clearly is compensation data reported by employees themselves. SimplyHired aggregates self-reported salaries for five roles: three back-end developers averaging $223,333; one site reliability engineer at $210,000; one shift leader at $160,000; one strategy manager at $125,000; and one UX/UI designer at $120,000. These figures align with salary bands for 13 salaried roles spanning $66,000 to $248,000 with a $140,000 median. The convergence between employee-reported cash and posted bands suggests the company prices roles consistently and at the upper end of early-stage market rates.
The review volume itself tells a story. Twenty-four Glassdoor reviews for a company of 11–50 employees (per SimplyHired) implies a high participation rate. Two Indeed reviews suggest either lower traffic on that platform or a newer employer profile. Neither source dates individual reviews in the aggregated data, so it's impossible to trace sentiment shifts over time or isolate feedback from specific cohorts. The absence of dated, attributed verbatims means I cannot quote a 2023 engineer praising autonomy or a 2024 designer flagging burnout — those specifics simply aren't in the accessible record.
What the numbers do support is a compensation posture that matches the "high-ownership, fast-moving" culture the company advertises. Cash at the upper end for early-stage fintech/consumer roles, paired with a small team, means every hire carries disproportionate scope. The review averages, while statistically thin, don't contradict that picture; they reinforce it.
Who Stays, Who Leaves
The structure is a coordination mechanism: 76 people total, 23 in product and tech, four mandated days in a New York office. The founders sit in the office alongside engineers and market-operations specialists. The company explicitly encourages cross-functional collaboration and runs Lunch and Learns to spread context. Promote-from-inside is listed as policy.
Sydney Sweeney's equity-partner arrangement is an exaggerated version of the same dynamic. She told Complex she "thrives while wearing multiple hats" and values "creative authority that is really amazing to be able to sit at a table and be a part of every discussion, whether it's from casting, marketing, budgeting, who we're going to sell this to, what market."
The compensation mix reinforces the filter. Zero G Talent's board data shows a software-engineer band of $200k–$260k base plus equity. The median across thirteen listed roles is $140k. The Chief Fan Officer role spans $100k–$300k, a width that only makes sense if outcomes, not titles, set the pay, Zero G Talent's board shows. Equity is standard across the board.
Public scrutiny is another filter. The "Just Sports" campaign drew organized backlash from female athletes; Fortinsky told USA Today the company "expected the people who already hate her would be sort of loud and vocal" and proceeded anyway.
Quarterly engagement surveys and formal manager training suggest leadership knows the pressure is real and is trying to instrument retention. "Managers offer consistent feedback loops" and "recognition rituals" are listed as benefits. The burnout profile is predictable: specialists who joined for a narrow craft and found themselves context-switching across regulatory, infra, and growth work; remote-first hires who underestimated the four-day office cadence; risk-averse operators who wanted the equity lottery ticket without the daily variance.
Conversely, the thrive profile is equally legible: early-career generalists who want to see the whole board, mid-level operators who have outgrown big-company guardrails and want direct ownership of revenue-critical surfaces, and New York–based builders who treat the office as a force multiplier rather than a commute tax. If the CFTC market scales, the upside is real. If it doesn't, the cash was market-rate for the time served. The people who stay are the ones who would have taken the job even without the equity, because the density of decisions per week is the actual compensation.
Working in AI? Zero G Talent tracks the openings: see every open Novig role, browse AI jobs, the companies hiring, and the people building the field.