Senior Backend Engineer, Perpetuals

Polymarket; City of Utica (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary & equity

Unlimited PTO

Full Health, Vision, & Dental coverage

401k match

Hardware setup: new MacBook Pro

Job summary

Polymarket is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to manage core systems that support their exchange. This role involves optimizing low-latency order matching and ensuring system reliability under load.

The ideal candidate will have experience in building exchange systems, strong Rust knowledge, and a passion for backend engineering. Benefits include competitive pay, unlimited PTO, and comprehensive health coverage.

Qualifications

• Senior backend engineering experience with order-book-based exchange systems.
• Knowledge of low-latency systems and performance profiling.
• Experience with matching engines or order state management.

Responsibilities

• Own core exchange backend systems and drive improvements.
• Build and optimize the matching engine for latency and throughput.
• Design systems for correctness at scale and improve runtime performance.

Skills

Low-latency systems

Order-book-based exchange systems

Concurrency

Performance profiling

Observability fundamentals

Algorithms

Tools

Rust

Redis

PostgreSQL

gRPC

Protobuf

Kubernetes

AWS

Job description

Polymarket is the world's largest prediction market platform. We enable individuals to express views on real-world events by trading on outcomes across politics, economics, sports, culture, and current affairs. Built as a peer‑to‑peer marketplace with no centralized "house," Polymarket aggregates diverse opinions into transparent, market‑based probabilities that reflect collective expectations about the future.

We’re growing fast, both in terms of volume ($21B traded in 2025) and adoption as an alternative news source. Our ambition is to become a ubiquitous beacon of truth in global media and we need your help adding fuel to the fire.

About The Role

Polymarket is launching perpetual futures and we’re looking for Senior Backend Engineers to own the core systems that make it run. This is backend exchange engineering in the truest sense: low‑latency order matching, high‑throughput order state management, and the infrastructure that keeps an exchange operating correctly under load.

Ownership here is real and broad. We’re looking for engineers who have built and operated order‑book‑based exchange systems before and can step in with deep context, take meaningful ownership of critical backend components, and raise the reliability and performance of the platform as we scale. If you’ve worked on the backend of a serious exchange and want to do it again somewhere with momentum, this is the role.

What You’ll Do

• Own core exchange backend systems. Take deep ownership of the systems that power order matching, position management, and order state across perpetual futures.
• Build and optimize the matching engine. Profile hot paths, reduce lock contention, and drive improvements to latency and throughput backed by benchmarks and production‑grade evidence.
• Design for correctness at scale. Build queueing and backpressure mechanisms that keep the orderbook consistent and reliable under high load, without crossing books, creating ghost fills, or introducing stale order state.
• Build for observability. Instrument systems with metrics, logs, and traces. Establish rollback guarantees and narrow critical paths that make production incidents faster to detect, diagnose, and resolve.
• Improve runtime performance. Optimize CPU, memory, and allocation behavior to meet the demands of a high‑throughput exchange in production.
• Own production incidents end‑to‑end. Debug latency and correctness issues directly, and drive follow‑through that leaves the system measurably better each time.

What We’re Looking For

• Senior backend engineering experience with a strong background in order‑book‑based exchange systems.
• Deep knowledge of low‑latency systems: concurrency, lock contention, async correctness, and performance profiling.
• Experience with matching engines, order state management, or similar exchange infrastructure.
• Comfort working in Rust or a strong willingness to work in it — enthusiasm for the language is a plus, resistance to it is a red flag.
• Strong observability fundamentals: metrics, logs, distributed traces, and profiling tools.
• Strong computer science fundamentals: algorithms, data structures, and systems design.
• (Plus) Experience with high‑frequency or low‑latency trading infrastructure.
• (Plus) Familiarity with Redis, PostgreSQL, gRPC, and Protobuf.
• (Plus) Kubernetes and AWS production operations experience.

Benefits

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