Staff Backend Engineer — Real-Time, Low-Latency Go Systems

Precision Labs; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 500,000; 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 ‑

Job summary

Polymarket in New York is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to own and scale the core exchange infrastructure. You’ll design low-latency services, primarily in Go, and work with Python/Java where needed to support real-money trading at meaningful volume.

You’ll work autonomously with a small team of senior engineers, focusing on correctness, performance, and reliability. Expect to diagnose live incidents, ship fixes, and collaborate across product, infra, and data.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of backend development experience with Go/Python/Java.
• Strong understanding of algorithms, data structures, concurrency and memory management.
• Experience building high-throughput, low-latency systems on Linux end-to-end.
• Focus on correctness and production reliability in high-stakes environments.
• Ability to work independently in a high-autonomy environment.
• Plus: background in trading systems or domains with latency constraints.
• Plus: production experience with Kafka/Pulsar or similar streaming platforms.
• Plus: familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, or ZeroMQ.
• Plus: experience deploying services in AWS or GCP using containers.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement low-latency backend services powering Polymarket's core exchange, primarily in Go, with Python/Java as needed.
• Profile and optimize systems across the stack to reduce latency and improve throughput.
• Build and maintain event-driven data pipelines using Kafka or Pulsar.
• Own production reliability, diagnose incidents, and ship fixes to prevent recurrence.
• Collaborate with product, infra, and data teams to tightly integrate services.
• Contribute to distributed systems architecture focusing on failure modes and graceful degradation.

Skills

Backend development

Go

Python/Java

Concurrency

Linux systems

High-throughput

Reliability

Trading systems

Tools

Kafka

Pulsar

gRPC

Protobuf

ZeroMQ

AWS

GCP

Containers

Job description

Polymarket in New York is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to own and scale the core exchange infrastructure. You’ll design low-latency services, primarily in Go, and work with Python/Java where needed to support real-money trading at meaningful volume.

You’ll work autonomously with a small team of senior engineers, focusing on correctness, performance, and reliability. Expect to diagnose live incidents, ship fixes, and collaborate across product, infra, and data.