Senior Backend Engineer, US Exchange
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 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 that powers our markets. This role is focused on high-performance, low-latency backend systems that must be correct, fast, and resilient under real-world trading load.
You’ll be a core individual contributor working with other senior engineers to design, implement, and optimize the systems that sit at the heart of Polymarket’s exchange. This is a high-ownership role with minimal bureaucracy and a strong bias toward execution.
WHAT YOU’LL DO
We’re looking for an experienced backend engineer who enjoys working close to the metal and solving hard distributed systems problems.
- Build the exchange backend: Design and implement scalable, low-latency backend services that power Polymarket’s exchange, using C/C++ or other performance-oriented systems languages (Go, Rust, Java).
- Optimize for performance & scale: Profile, tune, and debug systems with a focus on latency, throughput, memory usage, and correctness in production.
- Design distributed systems: Build and operate robust APIs, data pipelines, and event-driven systems using messaging and streaming platforms (Kafka, Pulsar, RabbitMQ).
- Own reliability & operations: Reinforce security, availability, performance, and...