Senior Backend Engineer, Trading & Connectivity

About Polymarket Polymarket is the world's largest prediction market platform. We enable individuals to express views on real-world events by trading on outcomes across politics, economics, sports, culture, and current affairs. Built as a peer-to-peer marketplace with no centralized “house,” Polymarket aggregates diverse opinions into transparent, market-based probabilities that reflect collective expectations about the future. We’re growing fast: both in volume ($21B traded in 2025) and in adoption as an alternative news source. Our ambition is to become a ubiquitous beacon of truth in global media, powered by fast, reliable, and deeply technical market infrastructure. About the role Polymarket is looking for a senior/staff backend engineer to own the systems that connect our exchange to the outside world — market data distribution, order routing, and the high-throughput event pipelines that keep trading fast and reliable at scale. This is a high-ownership individual contributor role with direct impact on the reliability and latency of Polymarket’s core trading infrastructure, working alongside senior engineers with minimal bureaucracy and a strong bias toward execution. What you’ll do - 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. What we’re looking for - 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. - (Plus) Experience in trading systems, HFT, or other latency-sensitive, high-throughput domains. - (Plus) Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, or similar technologies, and experience deploying systems in cloud environments (AWS/GCP). Benefits - Competitive salary & equity - Unlimited PTO - Full Health, Vision, & Dental coverage - 401k match - Hardware setup — new MacBook Pro, big display, & accessories