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Staff Backend Engineer

Polymarket· Engineering
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New York, Remote$250k - $400kFull-timePosted 1w ago

About the role

Staff Backend Engineers own and shape critical backend systems as Polymarket scales, focusing on fast, correct, and reliable systems for high-volume trading and market data. Individual contributor with high autonomy and ownership, collaborating with senior engineers and stakeholders to design, build, and operate backend services.

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 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

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 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

Skills

Required:GoDistributed systems
Nice to have:PythonJava

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
Last updated Oct 18, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Polymarket

Polymarket | The World's Largest Prediction Market™

Polymarket is the world's largest prediction market, allowing you to stay informed and profit from your knowledge by trading on future events across various topics.

BTC Up or DownBitcoinEconomyEsportsGeopoliticsMarketsPrediction MarketSoccer
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