Backend Engineer
US$250,000 – US$500,000 / yr base salary
Posted 3 Sep 2026
Advertised as “Staff Backend Engineer, Services”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Management level
- Individual contributor
- Employment
- On-Site
- Contract
- Full-time
| Base salary | US$250,000 – US$500,000 / yr |
|---|
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
The exchange is the core of what Polymarket does. Every trade, every order, every market resolution runs through the systems this team owns. As a Staff Backend Engineer on the Services team, you'll be working directly on that infrastructure, building and scaling the backend that processes real money, in real time, at meaningful volume. The work is technical, high-stakes, and unambiguous in its consequences.
This is an individual contributor role with high autonomy and high ownership. You'll work alongside a small group of senior engineers who care deeply about correctness and performance. There's no heavy process here, no committees, no long approval chains. You'll be expected to identify problems, propose solutions, and ship them. The mandate is simple: keep the exchange fast, correct, and available as Polymarket continues to scale.
If you've spent your career building systems where performance actually matters, where a bug in production has real consequences, this is the kind of problem you've been waiting to work on.
What You'll Do
-
Design and implement low-latency backend services that power Polymarket's core exchange, primarily in Go, with Python or Java where appropriate.
-
Profile and tune systems across the full stack, identifying bottlenecks in latency, throughput, and memory usage before they become production problems.
-
Build and maintain event-driven data pipelines and APIs using streaming platforms like Kafka or Pulsar, ensuring data moves reliably and quickly across the exchange.
-
Own production reliability for the systems you build, including diagnosing live incidents, writing postmortems, and shipping fixes that prevent recurrence.
-
Work directly with engineers across product, infrastructure, and data to integrate exchange services tightly with the broader platform.