I don't understand why they want to build a high-performance exchange engine, in Node.js. Even I wouldn't choose my language of choice, but would rather look at either Java, C/C++, hell even Go or Erlang!
Not only that but the people building it have no idea what they're getting into. I tried to provoke them into a discussion of getting some design/spec docs for the matching engine online and everyone insisted it was "obvious" until I pushed them for 20 mins.