Staff Backend Engineer
Polymarket9 hours ago
Remote, United States or New York, NY, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$250k - $400k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own the design, construction, and production operation of critical backend systems.
- Set technical direction and influence architecture across teams, including decisions about scale, failure modes, and graceful degradation.
- Solve open-ended technical problems and turn them into shipped plans and systems.
- Build high-performance backend services and APIs, primarily in Go.
- Profile and tune production performance, lead incident response, and prevent recurring reliability issues.
- Maintain high correctness standards for systems with financial consequences.
- Partner with Product, Infrastructure, Data, and business stakeholders to turn ambiguous requirements into working systems.
- Mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and help establish engineering standards.
Requirements
- 7+ years of professional backend engineering experience.
- Strong proficiency in Go, Python, or Java, with Go preferred.
- Deep knowledge of distributed systems, concurrency, data structures, and algorithms.
- Experience designing, shipping, and operating high-scale distributed systems in production.
- Demonstrated technical leadership, including setting direction for systems spanning teams and helping other engineers develop.
- Ability to work independently, manage ambiguity, and drive work forward without waiting for direction.
- Sound judgment balancing speed, quality, and long-term maintainability.
- Preferred experience with trading or exchange systems, large-scale consumer platforms, risk, fraud, compliance, derivatives, or risk engines.
- Preferred background in latency-critical or financial domains such as HFT, fintech, payments, crypto, or gaming.
- Preferred production experience with Kafka or Pulsar and RPC frameworks such as gRPC, Connect, or Protobuf.
- Preferred experience running containerized services on AWS or GCP.
Benefits
- Competitive salary and equity.
- Unlimited paid time off.
- Health, vision, and dental coverage.
- 401(k) match.
- Full hardware setup including a new MacBook Pro, large display, and accessories.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Polymarket
Polymarket operates an online prediction-market exchange where people trade on the outcomes of real-world events across politics, economics, sports, and culture. The platform aggregates trades into market-based probabilities and generates revenue through trading fees on a peer‑to‑peer marketplace. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in New York, it is a privately held company.