Senior Backend Engineer

About the Company

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 volume ($21B traded in 2025) and in adoption as an alternative news source. Our ambition is to become a ubiquitous beacon of truth in global media, powered by fast, reliable, and deeply technical market infrastructure.

About the Role

Polymarket is looking for a backend engineer to help build and scale the core exchange infrastructure for Polymarket US — our CFTC-regulated exchange. You'll work on the systems that power order matching, settlement, risk management, and market data delivery.

You'll be a core individual contributor working with other senior engineers to design, implement, and scale backend services in a latency-sensitive, high-throughput environment. This is exchange engineering — the stakes are real, the code matters, and the problems are hard.

Key Responsibilities

• Build the exchange backend: Design and implement scalable, low-latency backend services that power Polymarket's exchange, using C/C++ and Go.
• Optimize for performance & scale: Profile, tune, and debug systems with a focus on latency, throughput, memory usage, and correctness at scale.
• Design distributed systems: Build and operate robust APIs, data pipelines, and event-driven systems using messaging and streaming infrastructure.
• Own reliability & operations: Reinforce security, availability, performance, and scalability across backend systems, and participate in on-call rotations.
• Collaborate cross-functionally: Work closely with engineers across product, infra, and data to ensure tight integration between the exchange and the broader platform.
• Contribute to code quality: Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and architectural decisions to maintain a high bar for engineering excellence.

Requirements

• 4+ years of professional backend development experience, with strong proficiency in C/C++ (preferred) or Go.
• Solid understanding of algorithms, data structures, concurrency, memory management, and experience building high-performance systems.
• Comfortable working on complex systems end-to-end, debugging production issues on Linux, and taking full ownership of features.
• Experience in trading systems, HFT, exchanges, or other latency-sensitive domains.

Bonus Skills

• Production experience with Kafka, Pulsar, or similar streaming platforms at scale
• Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, ZeroMQ, or similar technologies
• Experience deploying systems in cloud environments (AWS/GCP) and using containers
• Background at a financial exchange, electronic trading desk, or market-making firm