Staff Backend Engineer, Services
Build and scale low-latency backend services for Polymarket’s core exchange, owning performance, distributed systems architecture, and production reliability. The role requires 7+ years of backend experience and strong proficiency in Go, Python, or Java, with Go preferred.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Design and implement low-latency backend services powering the core exchange, primarily in Go, with Python or Java where appropriate.
- Profile and tune systems across the full stack to identify latency, throughput, and memory bottlenecks.
- Build and maintain event-driven data pipelines and APIs using streaming platforms such as Kafka or Pulsar.
- Own production reliability, including diagnosing live incidents, writing postmortems, and shipping preventative fixes.
- Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and data engineers to integrate exchange services across the platform.
- Contribute to distributed-systems architecture, focusing on failure modes, graceful degradation, and recovery from partial outages.
Requirements
- 7+ years of professional backend development experience.
- Strong proficiency in Go, Python, or Java; Go experience is strongly preferred.
- Deep understanding of algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and memory management.
- Experience building and debugging high-throughput, low-latency systems on Linux from design through production operation.
- Strong focus on correctness and defensive programming in systems with financial consequences.
- Ability to work independently in a high-autonomy environment.
Nice-to-haves
- Experience with trading systems, high-frequency trading, gaming, telecom, or other latency-sensitive domains.
- Production experience with Kafka, Pulsar, or similar streaming platforms at scale.
- Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, or ZeroMQ.
- Experience deploying and operating cloud services on AWS or Google Cloud using containers and modern deployment tooling.
Compensation and Benefits
- Base salary: $250,000–$500,000, plus equity and benefits.
- Unlimited PTO.
- Full health, vision, and dental coverage.
- 401(k) match.
- Hardware setup including a new MacBook Pro, display, and accessories.
Skills
Go, Python, Java, Algorithms, Data Structures, Concurrency, Memory Management, Linux, Kafka, Pulsar, gRPC, Protobuf, Zeromq, AWS, GCP
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