Staff Backend Engineer

The role

Staff Backend Engineers will own and shape critical backend systems from architecture to production. You will build fast and correct services and APIs, primarily in Go, to support a global prediction market platform.

What you will do

• Own the design, build, and operation of critical backend systems end to end
• Set technical direction for your area and influence architecture across teams
• Turn hard, open-ended technical problems into clear plans that ship
• Build services and APIs mainly in Go
• Own production reliability including performance tuning and incident response
• Hold a high bar for correctness in systems where bugs cost real money
• Partner with Product, Infrastructure, Data, and business stakeholders
• Mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and help set engineering standards

Required qualifications

• 7+ years of professional backend engineering experience
• Strong proficiency in Go, Python, or Java
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems, concurrency, data structures, and algorithms
• Track record of designing, shipping, and operating high-scale distributed systems in production
• Obsession with correctness and reliability
• Proven technical leadership
• Ability to work independently and handle ambiguity

Nice to have

• Deep experience in trading or exchange systems, consumer product platforms at scale, risk/fraud/compliance engineering, or derivatives and risk engines
• Background in latency-critical or financial domains (HFT, fintech, payments, crypto, gaming)
• Production experience with streaming platforms (Kafka, Pulsar) and RPC frameworks (gRPC/Connect, Protobuf)
• Experience running services on AWS or GCP with containers and modern deployment tooling

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity
• Unlimited PTO
• Health, vision, and dental coverage
• 401(k) match
• Full hardware setup: new MacBook Pro, large display, and accessories

About the company

Polymarket is the world's largest prediction market platform. It enables individuals to express views on real-world events by trading on outcomes across politics, economics, sports, culture, and current affairs.