Staff Backend Engineer (Go)

Location: New York, United States; remote and on-site options listed

Salary: $250,000–$400,000 annually, plus equity and benefits.

Company

Polymarket operates a peer-to-peer prediction market platform covering politics, economics, sports, culture, and current affairs.

What you will do

• Design, build, operate, and evolve critical backend systems from architecture through production.
• Set technical direction and influence architecture across teams, with emphasis on scale, failure modes, and graceful degradation.
• Build fast, correct, and maintainable services and APIs, mainly in Go.
• Profile and tune production systems, lead incident response, and prevent recurring reliability issues.
• Partner with Product, Infrastructure, Data, and business stakeholders to turn ambiguous requirements into working systems.
• Mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and help establish engineering standards.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional backend engineering experience.
• Strong proficiency in Go, Python, or Java; Go is preferred.
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems, concurrency, data structures, and algorithms.
• Experience designing, shipping, and operating high-scale distributed systems in production.
• Strong focus on correctness and reliability in systems with financial consequences.
• Proven technical leadership, independent execution, and sound judgment on speed, quality, and maintainability tradeoffs.

Nice to have

• Experience with trading or exchange systems, large-scale consumer platforms, risk, fraud, compliance, derivatives, or risk engines.
• Background in latency-critical or financial domains such as HFT, fintech, payments, crypto, or gaming.
• Production experience with Kafka, Pulsar, gRPC, Connect, or Protobuf.
• Experience running containerized services on AWS or GCP with modern deployment tooling.

Culture & Benefits

• High-autonomy individual contributor role with substantial ownership.
• Small group of senior engineers and lightweight processes.
• Competitive salary, equity, and unlimited PTO.
• Health, vision, dental, and 401(k) matching.
• Full hardware setup, including a new MacBook Pro, display, and accessories.