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Polymarket is the world's largest prediction market platform, enabling users to trade on real-world outcomes across politics, economics, sports, culture, and current affairs. The platform processed $21B in trades in 2025 and is growing rapidly as an alternative news source.
As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Services team, you'll own core exchange infrastructure—the systems that process every trade, order, and market resolution in real time with real money at stake. This is an individual contributor role with high autonomy and ownership. You'll work alongside a small group of senior engineers focused on correctness and performance, with minimal process overhead. Your mandate is to keep the exchange fast, correct, and available as Polymarket scales.
Key responsibilities include designing and implementing low-latency backend services primarily in Go (with Python or Java as needed); profiling and tuning systems across the full stack to identify bottlenecks before they hit production; building and maintaining event-driven data pipelines using Kafka or Pulsar; owning production reliability including incident diagnosis and postmortem-driven fixes; collaborating with product, infrastructure, and data teams; and contributing to distributed systems architecture decisions with focus on failure modes and graceful degradation.
You'll need 4–7+ years of professional backend development with strong Go, Python, or Java proficiency (Go is a significant advantage). Deep expertise in algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and memory management is essential, with proven application to real production systems. You should have hands-on experience building and debugging high-throughput, low-latency systems on Linux end-to-end. A strong instinct for correctness—especially in systems with financial consequences—is critical; you write defensively, think about edge cases early, and treat production bugs seriously. You work independently in high-autonomy environments, identifying and executing on what needs to be done without waiting to be unblocked.
Plus factors include experience in trading systems, high-frequency trading, gaming, telecom, or other latency-critical domains; production experience with Kafka, Pulsar, or similar streaming platforms at scale; familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, or ZeroMQ; and experience deploying and operating services in AWS or GCP using containers and modern tooling.
