Staff Backend Engineer

About the Role

When the world's biggest stories break, whether that's an election night, a Fed decision or a championship game, people come to Polymarket to see what's likely to happen next. Millions of trades, price updates and market resolutions flow through our backend as events unfold, and every one of them has to be fast and correct. We're hiring Staff Backend Engineers to own and shape those systems as Polymarket grows into a global source of truth.

This is an individual contributor role with high autonomy and high ownership. You'll work alongside a small group of senior engineers who care deeply about correctness and performance. There's no heavy process here, no committees, no long approval chains. You'll find the most important problems, propose solutions, and ship them. Depending on your background, you might focus on our exchange and trading systems, the platform behind our consumer apps, the systems that protect our users and markets from fraud and abuse, or new products we're bringing to market.

If you want your work to matter the moment it ships, and to be part of the team building one of the fastest-growing platforms in finance and media, this is the role.

What You'll Do

• Own the design, build, and operation of critical backend systems end to end, from architecture to production
• Set technical direction for your area and influence architecture across teams, with careful thought about scale, failure modes, and graceful degradation
• Take on the hardest, most open-ended technical problems and turn them into clear plans that ship
• Build services and APIs, mainly in Go, that are fast, correct, and easy for other teams to build on
• Own production reliability: profile and tune performance, lead incident response, and drive the fixes that prevent repeat issues
• Hold a high bar for correctness in systems where bugs cost real money
• Partner with Product, Infrastructure, Data, and business stakeholders to turn ambiguous requirements into working systems
• Mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and help set engineering standards as the team grows

What We're Looking for

• 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
• A track record of designing, shipping, and operating high-scale distributed systems in production
• An obsession with correctness and reliability, especially where failures have financial consequences
• Proven technical leadership: you've set direction for systems that span teams and helped engineers around you get better
• The 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) Deep experience in one or more of: trading or exchange systems, consumer product platforms at scale, risk/fraud/compliance engineering, or derivatives and risk engines
• (Plus) Background in latency-critical or financial domains (HFT, fintech, payments, crypto, gaming)
• (Plus) Production experience with streaming platforms (Kafka, Pulsar) and RPC frameworks (gRPC/Connect, Protobuf)
• (Plus) Experience running services on AWS or GCP with containers and modern deployment tooling

Benefits

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

Base salary range

$250,000 to $400,000 annually, plus equity and benefits.

This range reflects a good-faith estimate for this position. Experience levels vary widely within a title here, so please reach out even if your expectations fall outside it. We're always happy to chat.