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PolymarketPolymarketNew York, NY

Senior Backend Engineer, Exchange Systems

Own and evolve the CLOB engine and exchange systems for a high-throughput prediction market platform. Focus on low-latency APIs, concurrent orderbook improvements, settlement risk, and Go/Rust performance at scale.

Salary not listed
RemoteBackend Engineering

About the role

Responsibilities

  • Own the CLOB engine's critical path: profile matching and orderbook hot paths, map settlement-sensitive state transitions, and drive improvements to latency, throughput, and async engine flow backed by benchmarks and production-grade evidence
  • Reduce lock contention without breaking correctness: debug concurrency issues, design safer queueing and backpressure for orderbooks, and improve the system's ability to handle materially more markets and order flow with lower tail latency
  • Build for observability and safety: instrument improvements with pprof, metrics, logs, and traces; establish rollback guarantees and narrower critical paths
  • Reason about settlement risk: understand how on-chain transaction effects ripple into off-chain exchange state and design systems that handle crossed books, ghost fills, stale orders, cancel inconsistencies, and settlement edge cases correctly
  • Improve the runtime: reduce GC pressure, optimize CPU and memory allocation behavior, and push Go runtime performance
  • Debug production incidents: own latency, correctness, and settlement-state incidents end-to-end

Requirements

  • Production experience building low-latency backend systems at scale
  • Strong concurrency skills and a track record debugging lock contention, race conditions, and async correctness issues
  • Fluency in production Go and Rust
  • Deep observability experience: pprof, metrics, logs, and distributed traces
  • Experience with exchange systems that interact with EVM or blockchain settlement layers
  • Strong computer science fundamentals: algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and profiling

Nice-to-Haves

  • Direct experience with matching engines or exchange infrastructure
  • EVM transaction lifecycle experience: confirmations, reorgs, and how on-chain state affects off-chain systems
  • Go runtime and GC tuning experience
  • Experience with Redis, PostgreSQL, gRPC, and Protobuf
  • Kubernetes and AWS production operations experience

Benefits

  • Competitive salary & equity
  • Unlimited PTO
  • Full Health, Vision, & Dental coverage
  • 401k match
  • Hardware setup: new MacBook Pro, big display, & accessories

Skills

GoRustclobmatching enginesConcurrencylow-latency systemspprofdistributed tracingevmblockchain settlementRedisPostgresgRPCprotobufKubernetes

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