Senior Backend Engineer — Low-Latency, High-Performance Equity

Polymarket; United States; On-site; USD 120,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary & equity

Unlimited PTO

Full Health, Vision, & Dental coverage

401k match

Hardware setup — new MacBook Pro, big‑

display, & accessories

Job summary

Polymarket is seeking a backend engineer to build and scale the core exchange infrastructure that powers our markets. This role focuses on high-performance, low-latency backend systems that must remain correct, fast, and resilient under real-world trading load.

You’ll be a core contributor working with senior engineers to design, implement, and optimize the systems at the heart of Polymarket’s exchange, with a strong bias toward ownership and execution.

Qualifications

• 4–7+ years of professional backend development experience with strong proficiency in C/C++ (preferred) or another systems language
• Solid understanding of algorithms, data structures, concurrency, memory management and high-throughput systems
• Comfortable debugging production issues on Linux and ensuring correctness and performance
• Plus: experience in trading systems, HFT, gaming, telecom or latency-sensitive domains
• Plus: production experience with Kafka, Pulsar or similar streaming platforms at scale
• Plus: familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, ZeroMQ, or similar technologies
• Plus: deploying systems in cloud environments (AWS/GCP) and using containers

Responsibilities

• Build the exchange backend with scalable, low-latency services in performance-oriented languages
• Optimize for latency, throughput, memory usage and correctness in production
• Design distributed systems with APIs, data pipelines and event-driven components
• Own reliability, security, availability, and scalability across backend systems
• Collaborate with product, infra and data teams for tight integration with the platform
• Contribute to code quality through reviews and architectural decisions

Skills

Backend development

C/C++

Go/Rust/Java

Low-latency systems

Linux

Distributed systems

Tools

Kafka

Pulsar

RabbitMQ

gRPC

Protobuf

ZeroMQ

AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Polymarket is seeking a backend engineer to build and scale the core exchange infrastructure that powers our markets. This role focuses on high-performance, low-latency backend systems that must remain correct, fast, and resilient under real-world trading load.

You’ll be a core contributor working with senior engineers to design, implement, and optimize the systems at the heart of Polymarket’s exchange, with a strong bias toward ownership and execution.