Staff Backend Engineer
At a glance
Senior Backend Engineering role at Polymarket. New York · full-time · $250,000–$400,000 base.
techroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Design, build and run core backend systems, taking them from architecture through production
- Set technical direction for your area and shape cross-team architecture around scale, failures and graceful recovery
- Build fast, dependable Go services and APIs that other teams can use
- Improve production performance and reliability by tuning systems, leading incident response and preventing repeat problems
- Turn unclear needs into plans and shipped systems while mentoring engineers and leading design reviews
What you bring
- At least seven years of professional backend engineering, with strong skills in Go, Python or Java; Go is preferred
- Deep understanding of distributed systems, concurrency, data structures and algorithms
- A record of designing, launching and operating large-scale distributed systems in production
- Technical leadership that includes setting direction across teams and helping other engineers improve
Who this fits
This suits a senior individual contributor who can work independently, take ownership and make progress through ambiguity. The role is onsite in New York.
From the employer
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
When the world's biggest stories break, whether that's an election night, a Fed decision or a championship game, people come to Polymarket to see what's likely to happen next. Millions of trades, price updates and market resolutions flow through our backend as events unfold, and every one of them has to be fast and correct. We're hiring Staff Backend Engineers to own and shape those systems as Polymarket grows into a global source of truth.
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 find the most important problems, propose solutions, and ship them. Depending on your background, you might focus on our exchange and trading systems, the platform behind our consumer apps, the systems that protect our users and markets from fraud and abuse, or new products we're bringing to market.
If you want your work to matter the moment it ships, and to be part of the team building one of the fastest-growing platforms in finance and media, this is the role.
What You'll Do
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 careful thought about scale, failure modes, and graceful degradation
Take on the hardest, most open-ended technical problems and turn them into clear plans that ship
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 the fixes that prevent repeat issues
Hold a high bar for correctness in systems where bugs cost real money
Partner with Product, Infrastructure, Data, and business stakeholders to turn ambiguous requirements into working systems
Mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and help set engineering standards as the team grows
What We're Looking For
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 of: trading or exchange systems, consumer product platforms at scale, risk/fraud/compliance engineering, or derivatives and 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
Benefits
Competitive salary and equity
Unlimited PTO
Health, vision, and dental coverage
401(k) match
Full hardware setup: new MacBook Pro, large display, and accessories
Pay Transparency
Base salary range: $250,000 to $400,000 annually, plus equity and benefits.
This range reflects a good-faith estimate for this position. Experience levels vary widely within a title here, so please reach out even if your expectations fall outside it. We're always happy to chat.
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