# Senior Backend Engineer, Trading & Connectivity

**Company:** [Polymarket](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/polymarket)
**Location:** New York, NY
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** Kafka, gRPC, DynamoDB, Redis, protobuf, AWS, GCP
**Posted:** 2026-07-24

> 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.

## Job Description

## 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

## Similar roles

- [Software Engineer, API Enterprise Controls](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/4b9840ab-52bb-4f58-8ba8-7a86209809ef) - OpenAI - San Francisco, CA - $293k – $385k/yr
- [Senior Software Engineer - k6 Core](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/c1861813-0f71-4521-9df1-0bcb2b07d556) - Grafana Labs - Remote - $154k – $185k/yr
- [Senior Integration Engineer, Business Systems](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/abfbea2b-13a8-42d8-b046-1cf41aa333d9) - Square - Remote - $185k – $327k/yr
- [Senior Software Engineer](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/9bc91e47-05b7-4605-b3fe-d5c9014e3e19) - Twilio - Remote - $142k – $187k/yr
- [Senior Software Engineer - Messaging](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/f47a6d5e-eccf-4f33-933d-621f913004ee) - Reddit - Remote - $191k – $267k/yr

**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/f1f7e57b-1016-4fc8-9fd8-c1222b397b1d
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/f1f7e57b-1016-4fc8-9fd8-c1222b397b1d