Staff Backend Engineer

Polymarket • New York, NY

2d • $250,000 - $400,000

About The Position

Polymarket is hiring Staff Backend Engineers to own and shape backend systems that support its prediction market platform. Millions of trades, price updates, and market resolutions flow through the backend as major events unfold, and the systems must be fast and correct. This is an individual-contributor role with high autonomy and ownership, working with a small group of senior engineers. Depending on experience, the role may focus on exchange and trading systems, consumer application infrastructure, fraud and abuse prevention, or new products.

Requirements

• At least 7 years of professional backend engineering experience.
• Strong proficiency in Go, Python, or Java; Go is preferred.
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems, concurrency, data structures, and algorithms.
• Track record of designing, shipping, and operating high-scale distributed systems in production.
• Strong focus on correctness and reliability, especially where failures have financial consequences.
• Demonstrated technical leadership, including setting direction for systems spanning teams and helping other engineers improve.
• Ability to work independently, handle ambiguity, and drive work forward without waiting for direction.
• Sound judgment when balancing speed, quality, and long-term maintainability.

Nice To Haves

• Deep experience in trading or exchange systems, large-scale consumer product platforms, risk/fraud/compliance engineering, or derivatives and risk engines.
• Experience in latency-critical or financial domains such as HFT, fintech, payments, crypto, or gaming.
• Production experience with streaming platforms such as Kafka or Pulsar and RPC frameworks such as gRPC/Connect or Protobuf.
• Experience running services on AWS or GCP with containers and modern deployment tooling.

Responsibilities

• Own the design, construction, and operation of critical backend systems, from architecture through production.
• Set technical direction for an area and influence architecture across teams, considering scale, failure modes, and graceful degradation.
• Take on complex, open-ended technical problems and turn them into actionable plans that ship.
• Build fast, correct backend services and APIs, primarily in Go, that other teams can build on.
• Own production reliability by profiling and tuning performance, leading incident response, and preventing repeat issues.
• Maintain a high bar for correctness in systems where bugs can have financial consequences.
• Partner with Product, Infrastructure, Data, and business stakeholders to turn ambiguous requirements into working systems.
• Mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and help establish engineering standards as the team grows.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity.
• Unlimited PTO.
• Health, vision, and dental coverage.
• 401(k) match.
• Full hardware setup, including a new MacBook Pro, large display, and accessories.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed