Staff Backend Engineer (Go)

Location: New York, United States; on-site

Salary: $250,000–$500,000 base salary per year, plus equity and benefits

Company

Polymarket operates a peer-to-peer prediction market platform where users trade on outcomes across politics, economics, sports, culture, and current affairs.

What you will do

• Design and implement low-latency backend services for the core exchange, primarily using Go.
• Profile and tune systems to improve latency, throughput, and memory usage.
• Build and maintain event-driven data pipelines and APIs using Kafka, Pulsar, or similar streaming platforms.
• Own production reliability, diagnose live incidents, write postmortems, and ship preventive fixes.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and data engineers to integrate exchange services across the platform.
• Contribute to distributed-systems architecture, including failure handling, graceful degradation, and recovery from partial outages.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional backend development experience with strong proficiency in Go, Python, or Java.
• Deep knowledge of algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and memory management applied to production systems.
• Experience building and debugging high-throughput, low-latency systems on Linux from design through production operation.
• Strong focus on correctness and defensive engineering in systems with financial consequences.
• Ability to work independently with high autonomy and ownership.

Nice to have

• 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 operating cloud services on AWS or GCP with containers and modern deployment tooling.

Culture & Benefits

• High autonomy and ownership in a small, senior engineering group.
• Competitive salary and equity.
• Unlimited paid time off.
• Full health, vision, and dental coverage.
• 401(k) matching and a hardware setup including a new MacBook Pro, display, and accessories.