Staff Backend Engineer

As a Staff Backend Engineer at Polymarket, you own and shape the systems that power the world's largest prediction market platform. When major events break, millions of trades, price updates, and market resolutions flow through your backend, and every one must be fast and correct. You'll work with a small group of senior engineers on high-autonomy problems that matter the moment they ship, with no heavy process or approval chains standing in your way.

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 you bring

• 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

Nice to have

• Deep experience in trading or exchange systems, consumer product platforms at scale, risk/fraud/compliance engineering, or derivatives and risk engines
• Background in latency-critical or financial domains such as HFT, fintech, payments, crypto, or gaming
• Production experience with streaming platforms such as Kafka or Pulsar, and RPC frameworks such as gRPC/Connect and Protobuf
• Experience running services on AWS or GCP with containers and modern deployment tooling

What we offer

• Base salary of $250,000 to $400,000 annually, plus equity
• Health, vision, and dental coverage
• 401(k) match
• Unlimited PTO
• Full hardware setup: new MacBook Pro, large display, and accessories

About Polymarket

Polymarket is the world's largest prediction market platform, enabling individuals to trade on outcomes across politics, economics, sports, culture, and current affairs. Built as a peer-to-peer marketplace with no centralized house, the platform aggregates diverse opinions into transparent, market-based probabilities. With $21B traded in 2025, Polymarket is growing fast as an alternative news source and aims to become a ubiquitous beacon of truth in global media.