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PolymarketPolymarketNew York, NY

Senior Backend Engineer, Trading & Connectivity

Senior backend engineer owning high-throughput, low-latency connectivity infrastructure for Polymarket's prediction market exchange, including event pipelines, order routing, and market data distribution. Requires 8+ years experience with distributed systems, operational excellence, and technical leadership.

Salary not listed
On-site8+ YOEBackend Engineering

About the role

Responsibilities

  • Build high-throughput connectivity infrastructure: Design and scale distributed, event-driven systems (Kafka, gRPC, DynamoDB/Redis) that process hundreds of millions of events per day.
  • Own latency and scale: Profile and optimize order routing, market data distribution, and protocol-level integrations, driving 10x+ improvements in latency and throughput as volume grows.
  • Drive operational excellence: Run production on-call, lead KTLO and reliability initiatives, and standardize logging, deploy, and incident-response practices across the team.
  • Work close to the exchange: Partner on order routing, rate limiting, and protocol-level integrations that connect Polymarket’s exchange to market participants and downstream systems.
  • Provide technical leadership: Mentor engineers, contribute to hiring, and help set technical direction while remaining hands-on with delivery.
  • Collaborate cross-functionally: Work closely with Core Exchange, Markets, and Infra teams to keep connectivity systems tightly integrated with the rest of the platform.

Requirements

  • 8+ years of backend engineering experience, with a track record architecting high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems.
  • Deep expertise with event-driven architectures and streaming/messaging platforms (Kafka, gRPC, DynamoDB/Redis) at scale.
  • Strong operational ownership — experience running production on-call and driving reliability, logging, and deploy standardization for a team.
  • Comfortable working near exchange or market connectivity concerns (order routing, rate limiting, protocol-level integrations) or equivalent mission-critical infrastructure.
  • Demonstrated technical leadership — mentoring, hiring, or leading a small team — paired with hands-on delivery.

Nice-to-Haves

  • Experience in trading systems, HFT, or other latency-sensitive, high-throughput domains.
  • Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, or similar technologies, and experience deploying systems in cloud environments (AWS/GCP).

Compensation and Benefits

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

Skills

KafkagRPCDynamoDBRedisprotobufAWSGCP

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