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Salary: USD 250,000 - 500,000 / annual
Polymarket is the world's largest prediction market platform, enabling users to trade on real-world outcomes across politics, economics, sports, and culture. The platform processed $21B in trades in 2025 and is positioned as an alternative news source reflecting collective expectations about future events.
As a Staff Backend Engineer on the Services team, you will own and scale the core exchange infrastructure that processes real money at meaningful volume. This is a high-autonomy individual contributor role working directly on low-latency backend systems in a small group of senior engineers. You'll design and implement backend services primarily in Go, profile and tune systems across the full stack to eliminate bottlenecks, and build event-driven data pipelines using streaming platforms like Kafka or Pulsar.
Key responsibilities include owning production reliability for systems you build, diagnosing live incidents, writing postmortems, and shipping fixes to prevent recurrence. You'll work directly with engineers across product, infrastructure, and data teams to integrate exchange services with the broader platform. You'll contribute to architectural decisions on distributed systems design, focusing on failure modes, graceful degradation, and recovery under partial outages.
The role requires 7+ years of professional backend development with strong proficiency in Go, Python, or Java (Go experience is a significant advantage). You need deep understanding of algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and memory management applied to real production systems. Experience building and debugging high-throughput, low-latency systems on Linux end-to-end is essential. Strong instincts for correctness in systems with financial consequences, defensive coding practices, and comfort working independently in high-autonomy environments are critical.
Plus factors include experience in trading systems, high-frequency trading, gaming, or telecom; production experience with Kafka or Pulsar at scale; familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, or ZeroMQ; and experience deploying services in AWS or GCP with containers and modern tooling.
