Senior Backend Engineer, Trading & Connectivity at Polymarket

<h1>About Polymarket</h1><p style="min-height:1.5em">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.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">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.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h1>About the role</h1><p style="min-height:1.5em">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.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">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.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h1>What you’ll do</h1><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Build high-throughput connectivity infrastructure: </strong>Design and scale distributed, event-driven systems (Kafka, gRPC, DynamoDB/Redis) that process hundreds of millions of events per day.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Own latency and scale: </strong>Profile and optimize order routing, market data distribution, and protocol-level integrations, driving 10x+ improvements in latency and throughput as volume grows.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Drive operational excellence: </strong>Run production on-call, lead KTLO and reliability initiatives, and standardize logging, deploy, and incident-response practices across the team.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Work close to the exchange: </strong>Partner on order routing, rate limiting, and protocol-level integrations that connect Polymarket’s exchange to market participants and downstream systems.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Provide technical leadership: </strong>Mentor engineers, contribute to hiring, and help set technical direction while remaining hands-on with delivery.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Collaborate cross-functionally: </strong>Work closely with Core Exchange, Markets, and Infra teams to keep connectivity systems tightly integrated with the rest of the platform.</p></li></ul><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h1>What we’re looking for</h1><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">8+ years of backend engineering experien