Staff Backend Engineer, Perpetuals

About the role

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 terms of volume ($21B traded in 2025) and adoption as an alternative news source. Our ambition is to become a ubiquitous beacon of truth in global media and we need your help adding fuel to the fire.

About the Role

Polymarket launched our perpetual futures exchange this summer and we're looking for Staff Backend Engineers to own the core systems that make it run. You’ll work on distributed systems that have to be fast, correct and reliable under real load: low-latency order processing, high-throughput state management, and the infrastructure that keeps an exchange running correctly at scale.

You’ll own a lot here, and it’s real ownership. We want engineers who have built and run demanding backend systems in production, such as trading platforms, payments, real-time data pipelines, ad tech or large-scale infrastructure. You should be ready to take on critical components and make the platform more reliable and faster as we scale. Exchange experience is a big plus but not required. What matters most is deep distributed systems experience and a track record of building systems where latency and correctness both count.

What You'll Do

• Own core backend systems. Take deep ownership of the distributed systems behind order processing, position management and state across perpetual futures.

• Drive latency and throughput. Profile hot paths, reduce contention, and improve performance. Back every change with benchmarks and production data.

• Design for correctness at scale. Build queueing, backpressure and consistency mechanisms that keep state correct and reliable under high load and failure conditions.

• Build for observability. Instrument systems with metrics, logs and traces. Set up rollback guarantees and keep critical paths narrow so incidents are faster to detect, diagnose and resolve.

• Improve runtime performance. Tune CPU, memory and allocation behavior to meet the demands of a high-throughput production system.

• Own production incidents end-to-end. Debug latency and correctness issues directly, and follow through so the system is measurably better after each one.

What We're Looking For

• Staff-level backend engineering experience building and running distributed systems in production

• Deep experience with low-latency, high-throughput systems: concurrency, contention, async correctness and performance profiling

• Strong grasp of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency, fault tolerance, queueing, backpressure and state management under load

• Comfort working in Rust, or a strong willingness to learn it. Enthusiasm for the language is a plus; resistance to it is a red flag.

• Strong observability fundamentals: metrics, logs, distributed traces and profiling tools

• Strong computer science fundamentals: algorithms, data structures and systems design

• (Plus) Experience with exchange infrastructure, such as matching engines, order books or order state management

• (Plus) Experience with high-frequency or low-latency trading systems

• (Plus) Familiarity with Redis, PostgreSQL, gRPC and Protobuf

• (Plus) Kubernetes and AWS production operations experience

Benefits

• Competitive salary & equity

• Unlimited PTO

• Full Health, Vision, & Dental coverage

• 401k match

• Hardware setup: new MacBook Pro, big display, & accessories

Pay Transparency

Base salary range: $250,000 to $400,000 annually, plus equity and benefits.

This range reflects a good-faith estimate for this position. Experience levels vary widely within a title here, so please reach out even if your expectations fall outside it. We're always happy to chat.