Polymarket is a company that conducted an equity capital fundraising and received multiple direct investments from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE).
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