Senior Backend Engineer, Trading & Connectivity

Job details

Work model

On-site

Salary

Not listed by source

Location

New York

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 Polymarket is looking for a Senior/Staff Backend Engineer to own the systems that connect our exchange to the outside world - market data distribution, order routing, and the high-throughput event pipelines that keep trading fast and reliable at scale. This is a high-ownership individual contributor role with direct impact on the reliability and latency of Polymarket's core trading infrastructure, working alongside senior engineers with minimal bureaucracy and a strong bias toward execution. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Design and scale distributed, event-driven systems (Kafka, gRPC, DynamoDB/Redis) that process hundreds of millions of events per day - Profile and optimize order routing, market data distribution, and protocol-level integrations, driving 10x+ improvements in latency and throughput as volume grows - Run production on-call, lead KTLO and reliability initiatives, and standardize logging, deploy, and incident-response practices across the team - Partner on order routing, rate limiting, and protocol-level integrations that connect Polymarket's exchange to market participants and downstream systems - Mentor engineers, contribute to hiring, and help set technical direction while remaining hands-on with delivery - Work closely with Core Exchange, Markets, and Infra teams to keep connectivity systems tightly integrated with the rest of the platform WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 8+ years of backend engineering experience, with a track record architecting high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems - Deep expertise with event-driven architectures and streaming/messaging platforms (Kafka, gRPC, DynamoDB/Redis) at scale - Strong operational ownership - experience running production on-call and driving reliability, logging, and deploy standardization for a team - Comfortable working near exchange or market connectivity concerns (order routing, rate limiting, protocol-level integrations) or equivalent mission-critical infrastructure - Demonstrated technical leadership - mentoring, hiring, or leading a small team - paired with hands-on delivery - (Plus) Experience in trading systems, HFT, or other latency-sensitive, high-throughput domains - (Plus) Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, or similar technologies, and experience deploying systems in cloud environments (AWS/GCP) 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.