Staff Backend Engineer, Services

What You'll Do

• Design and implement low-latency backend services that power Polymarket's core exchange, primarily in Go, with Python or Java where appropriate.
• Profile and tune systems across the full stack, identifying bottlenecks in latency, throughput, and memory usage before they become production problems.
• Build and maintain event-driven data pipelines and APIs using streaming platforms like Kafka or Pulsar, ensuring data moves reliably and quickly across the exchange.
• Own production reliability for the systems you build, including diagnosing live incidents, writing postmortems, and shipping fixes that prevent recurrence.
• Work directly with engineers across product, infrastructure, and data to integrate exchange services tightly with the broader platform.
• Contribute to architectural decisions on distributed systems design, with a focus on failure modes, graceful degradation, and recovery under partial outages.

What We're Looking For

• 7+ years of professional backend development experience, with strong proficiency in Go, Python, or Java. Go experience is a significant advantage.
• Deep understanding of algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and memory management, with a track record of applying that knowledge to real production systems.
• Experience building and debugging high-throughput, low-latency systems on Linux end-to-end, from design through to production operation.
• Strong instincts for correctness, especially in systems where failures have financial consequences. You write defensively, think about edge cases early, and treat bugs in prod as a serious matter.
• Comfortable working independently in a high-autonomy environment. You identify what needs to be done and do it without waiting to be unblocked.
• (Plus) Experience in trading systems, high-frequency trading, gaming, telecom, or any domain where latency is a hard constraint, not a stretch goal.
• (Plus) Production experience with Kafka, Pulsar, or similar streaming platforms at meaningful scale.
• (Plus) Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, or ZeroMQ.
• (Plus) Experience deploying and operating services in cloud environments such as AWS or GCP, using containers and modern deployment tooling.

Benefits

• Competitive salary & equity
• Unlimited PTO
• Full Health, Vision, & Dental coverage
• 401k match
• Hardware setup: new MacBook Pro, big display, & accessories

Pay Transparency

Base salary range: $250,000 to $500,000, plus equity and benefits. This is a good-faith range for the level we're hiring at. Experience varies widely within a title here, so if your expectations fall outside it, reach out anyway. We're always happy to talk it through.