Senior Backend Engineer, Trading & Connectivity

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.

Responsibilities

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

Requirements

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

Nice to have

Experience in trading systems, HFT, or other latency-sensitive, high-throughput domains; 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