Polymarket is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer, Exchange Core 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, Exchange Core as described in the posting:
Polymarket is looking for a backend engineer to help build and scale the core exchange infrastructure that powers our markets. This role is focused on high-performance, low-latency backend systems that must be correct, fast, and resilient under real-world trading load.
You’ll be a core individual contributor working with other senior engineers to design, implement, and optimize the systems that sit at the heart of Polymarket’s exchange. This is a high-ownership role with minimal bureaucracy and a strong bias toward execution.
What you’ll do
Day-to-day scope for the Senior Backend Engineer, Exchange Core as described in the posting:
We’re looking for an experienced backend engineer who enjoys working close to the metal and solving hard distributed systems problems.
- Build the exchange backend: Design and implement scalable, low-latency backend services that power Polymarket’s exchange, using C/C++ or other performance-oriented systems languages (Go, Rust, Java).
- Optimize for performance & scale: Profile, tune, and debug systems with a focus on latency, throughput, memory usage, and correctness in production.
- Design distributed systems: Build and operate robust APIs, data pipelines, and event-driven systems using messaging and streaming platforms (Kafka, Pulsar, RabbitMQ).
- Own reliability & operations: Reinforce security, availability, performance, and scalability across backend systems, and participate in diagnosing and resolving production issues.
- Collaborate cross-functionally: Work closely with engineers across product, infra, and data to ensure tight integration between the exchange and the broader platform.
- Contribute to code quality: Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and architectural decisions to maintain a high bar for engineering excellence.
What we’re looking for
- 4–7+ years of professional backend development experience, with strong proficiency in C/C++ (preferred) or another systems language (Go, Rust, Java).
- Solid understanding of algorithms, data structures, concurrency, memory management, and experience building low-latency, high-throughput systems.
- Comfortable working on complex systems end-to-end, debugging production issues on Linux, and taking responsibility for correctness and performance.
- (Plus) Experience in trading systems, HFT, gaming, telecom, or other latency-sensitive domains
- (Plus) Production experience with Kafka, Pulsar, or similar streaming platforms at scale
- (Plus) Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, ZeroMQ, or similar technologies
- (Plus) Experience deploying systems in cloud environments (AWS/GCP) and using containers
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, Exchange Core 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.