Staff Backend Engineer, Services

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

About Polymarket

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

The exchange is the core of what Polymarket does. Every trade, every order, every market resolution runs through the systems this team owns. As a Staff Backend Engineer on the Services team, you'll be working directly on that infrastructure, building and scaling the backend that processes real money, in real time, at meaningful volume. The work is technical, high-stakes, and unambiguous in its consequences.

This is an individual contributor role with high autonomy and high ownership. You'll work alongside a small group of senior engineers who care deeply about correctness and performance. There's no heavy process here, no committees, no long approval chains. You'll be expected to identify problems, propose solutions, and ship them. The mandate is simple: keep the exchange fast, correct, and available as Polymarket continues to scale.

If you've spent your career building systems where performance actually matters, where a bug in production has real consequences, this is the kind of problem you've been waiting to work on.

What You'll Do

• Design and implement low-latency backend services that power Polymarket's core exchange, primarily in Go, with Python or Java where appropriate.




• Profile and tune systems across the full stack, identifying bottlenecks in latency, throughput, and memory usage before they become production problems.




• Build and maintain event-driven data pipelines and APIs using streaming platforms like Kafka or Pulsar, ensuring data moves reliably and quickly across the exchange.




• Own production reliability for the systems you build, including diagnosing live incidents, writing postmortems, and shipping fixes that prevent recurrence.




• Work directly with engineers across product, infrastructure, and data to integrate exchange services tightly with the broader platform.




• Contribute to architectural decisions on distributed systems design, with a focus on failure modes, graceful degradation, and recovery under partial outages.

What We're Looking For

• 7+ years of professional backend development experience, with strong proficiency in Go, Python, or Java. Go experience is a significant advantage.




• Deep understanding of algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and memory management, with a track record of applying that knowledge to real production systems.




• Experience building and debugging high-throughput, low-latency systems on Linux end-to-end, from design through to production operation.




• Strong instincts for correctness, especially in systems where failures have financial consequences. You write defensively, think about edge cases early, and treat bugs in prod as a serious matter.




• Comfortable working independently in a high-autonomy environment. You identify what needs to be done and do it without waiting to be unblocked.




• (Plus) Experience in trading systems, high-frequency trading, gaming, telecom, or any domain where latency is a hard constraint, not a stretch goal.




• (Plus) Production experience with Kafka, Pulsar, or similar streaming platforms at meaningful scale.




• (Plus) Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, or ZeroMQ.




• (Plus) Experience deploying and operating services in cloud environments such as AWS or GCP, using containers and modern deployment tooling.

Benefits

• Competitive salary & equity




• Unlimited PTO




• Full Health, Vision, & Dental coverage




• 401k match




• Hardware setup: new MacBook Pro, big display, & accessories

Pay Transparency

Base salary range: $250,000 to $500,000, plus equity and benefits.

This is a good-faith range for the level we're hiring at. Experience varies widely within a title here, so if your expectations fall outside it, reach out anyway. We're always happy to talk it through.