Senior Backend Engineer (Go)

Location: New York, United States; on-site

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 in Go, with Python or Java where appropriate.
• Profile and tune systems across the stack 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 by diagnosing incidents, writing postmortems, and preventing recurrence.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and data engineers to integrate exchange services.
• Contribute to distributed-systems architecture focused on failure modes, graceful degradation, and recovery.

Requirements

• 4–7+ years of professional backend development experience with strong proficiency in Go, Python, or Java; Go is a significant advantage.
• Strong understanding 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 for systems with financial consequences.
• Ability to work independently with high autonomy and ownership.

Nice to have

• Experience in 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 individual contributor role with significant ownership.
• Work alongside a small group of senior engineers focused on correctness and performance.
• Competitive salary and equity.
• Unlimited paid time off.
• Full health, vision, and dental coverage.
• 401(k) match and hardware setup including a MacBook Pro, display, and accessories.