Staff Backend Engineer - Low-Latency Real-Time Exchange

Polymarket; New York (NY); On-site; USD 250,000 - 500,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Unlimited PTO

Health, Vision, Dental

401k match

MacBook Pro setup

Job summary

Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market platform, seeks a Staff Backend Engineer to scale its real-time exchange infrastructure. You’ll own critical backend services, push performance boundaries, and ensure fast, reliable operation at high volumes.

You’ll work with senior engineers and cross-functional teams to design robust systems using Go, Python, and Java, with Kafka/Pulsar for streaming and cloud deployments on AWS or GCP. This role offers high autonomy and impact.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of backend development experience in Go, Python, or Java.
• Strong understanding of concurrency and memory management.
• Experience building high-throughput, low-latency systems on Linux.
• Defensive coding mindset; production incident handling expected.
• Able to work autonomously in a fast-paced, low-structure environment.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement low-latency backend services powering the core exchange, primarily in Go.
• Profile and optimize systems to reduce latency, improve throughput, and manage memory usage.
• Build and maintain event-driven data pipelines and APIs using Kafka or Pulsar.
• Own production reliability, diagnose incidents, and ship fixes to prevent recurrences.
• Collaborate with product, infra, and data teams to integrate services across the platform.
• Contribute to distributed systems design with focus on failure modes and graceful degradation.

Skills

Go

Python

Java

Concurrency

Memory mgmt

Tools

Kafka

Pulsar

gRPC

Protobuf

ZeroMQ

AWS

GCP

Job description

Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market platform, seeks a Staff Backend Engineer to scale its real-time exchange infrastructure. You’ll own critical backend services, push performance boundaries, and ensure fast, reliable operation at high volumes.

You’ll work with senior engineers and cross-functional teams to design robust systems using Go, Python, and Java, with Kafka/Pulsar for streaming and cloud deployments on AWS or GCP. This role offers high autonomy and impact.