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Salary: USD 250,000 - 400,000 / annual
Polymarket is the world's largest prediction market platform, enabling individuals to trade on outcomes across politics, economics, sports, culture, and current affairs. The platform operates as a peer-to-peer marketplace with no centralized house, aggregating diverse opinions into transparent, market-based probabilities. With $21B traded in 2025 and rapid growth, Polymarket is positioning itself as a ubiquitous beacon of truth in global media.
As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will own and shape the critical systems that power Polymarket's infrastructure. This is a high-autonomy individual contributor role working alongside a small group of senior engineers who prioritize correctness and performance. You'll operate with minimal process—no committees or lengthy approval chains—finding the most important problems, proposing solutions, and shipping them directly.
Your responsibilities will include:
- Designing, building, and operating critical backend systems end-to-end, from architecture through production
- Setting technical direction for your area and influencing architecture across teams, with careful consideration of scale, failure modes, and graceful degradation
- Tackling the hardest, most open-ended technical problems and converting them into clear, shippable plans
- Building services and APIs primarily in Go that are fast, correct, and easy for other teams to build upon
- Owning production reliability: profiling and tuning performance, leading incident response, and driving fixes that prevent recurrence
- Maintaining a high bar for correctness in systems where bugs have real financial consequences
- Partnering with Product, Infrastructure, Data, and business stakeholders to translate ambiguous requirements into working systems
- Mentoring engineers, leading design reviews, and helping establish engineering standards as the team scales
Depending on your background, you may focus on exchange and trading systems, the platform behind consumer apps, fraud and abuse prevention systems, or new products in development.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 7+ years of professional backend engineering experience with strong proficiency in Go, Python, or Java (Go preferred)
- Deep knowledge of distributed systems, concurrency, data structures, and algorithms
- Proven track record designing, shipping, and operating high-scale distributed systems in production
- Obsession with correctness and reliability, especially where failures carry financial consequences
- Demonstrated technical leadership: setting direction for systems spanning teams and helping engineers improve
- Ability to work independently, handle ambiguity, and drive work forward without waiting for direction
- Sound judgment on tradeoffs between speed, quality, and long-term maintainability
PLUS (preferred):
- Deep experience in trading/exchange systems, consumer product platforms at scale, risk/fraud/compliance engineering, or derivatives and risk engines
- Background in latency-critical or financial domains (HFT, fintech, payments, crypto, gaming)
- Production experience with streaming platforms (Kafka, Pulsar) and RPC frameworks (gRPC/Connect, Protobuf)
- Experience running services on AWS or GCP with containers and modern deployment tooling
