Staff Backend Engineer — High-Scale Go Systems + Equity

Polymarket; United States; Remote; USD 250,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and equity

Unlimited PTO

Health, vision, and dental coverage

401(k) match

Full hardware setup: MacBook Pro, high

Job summary

Polymarket is hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to own and shape fast, correct backend systems across trading and platform layers. You will work with senior engineers to define architecture, tackle hard problems, and shipping robust services in Go, Python or Java.

Expect ownership, autonomy, and high impact on a fast-growing finance and media platform. You’ll collaborate with Product, Infrastructure, and Data teams, mentoring others and raising engineering standards as Polymarket scales globally.

Qualifications

• 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: trading/exchange systems, consumer platforms at scale, risk/fraud/compliance engineering, or derivatives/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.

Responsibilities

• 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 scale and reliability considerations.
• Take on the hardest, most open-ended technical problems and turn them into actionable plans.
• 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 fixes to prevent repeats.
• Hold a high bar for correctness in systems with financial stakes.
• Partner with Product, Infrastructure, Data, and stakeholders to turn ambiguous requirements into working systems.
• Mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and help set engineering standards as the team grows.

Skills

Backend engineering

Go

Python

Java

Distributed systems

Concurrency

Leadership

Independent work

Tradeoffs judgment

Latency/financial domain awareness

Tools

Kafka

Pulsar

gRPC

Protobuf

AWS

GCP

Kubernetes

Job description

Polymarket is hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to own and shape fast, correct backend systems across trading and platform layers. You will work with senior engineers to define architecture, tackle hard problems, and shipping robust services in Go, Python or Java.

Expect ownership, autonomy, and high impact on a fast-growing finance and media platform. You’ll collaborate with Product, Infrastructure, and Data teams, mentoring others and raising engineering standards as Polymarket scales globally.