Polymarket is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer, Trading & Connectivity in Engineering — New York. The overview below is synthesized from the employer posting on jobs.ashbyhq.com: factual requirements and scope are preserved, but prose is rewritten with editorial context. Verify details and apply via the employer link.
About Polymarket
Company context from the listing:
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.
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.
About the role
Day-to-day scope for the Senior Backend Engineer, Trading & Connectivity as described in the posting:
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.
What you’ll do
Day-to-day scope for the Senior Backend Engineer, Trading & Connectivity as described in the posting:
- 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.
What we’re looking for
- 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.
- (Plus) Experience in trading systems, HFT, or other latency-sensitive, high-throughput domains.
- (Plus) Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, or similar technologies, and experience deploying systems in cloud environments (AWS/GCP).
Benefits
What the posting highlights about the offer:
- Competitive salary & equity
- Unlimited PTO
- Full Health, Vision, & Dental coverage
- 401k match
- Hardware setup — new MacBook Pro, big display, & accessories
Build a standout application
For the Senior Backend Engineer, Trading & Connectivity at Polymarket, reviewers look for concise evidence over buzzwords. Mirror the language of the posting sparingly, quantify support or delivery outcomes, and show how you handled ambiguity, time-zone collaboration and user empathy. Keep your resume to impact, keep your cover note to one page, and link to artifacts — tickets resolved, docs shipped, dashboards owned — that prove you can operate in a fast-moving Web3 team. Prepare to discuss a time you turned a confusing user report into a clear fix and how you measure quality in support and operations.
Web3 hiring values reliability: on-time follow-through, clear writing, and a track record of improving runbooks and tooling. Treat the application as a work sample. For interviews, be ready to walk through how you prioritize across time zones, handle a difficult user, and decide when to escalate versus resolve directly. Show how you document decisions so the next teammate benefits.
In a distributed Web3 org, trust builds through written clarity. Use the cover note to demonstrate it.