Polymarket is hiring a Senior Systems Engineer (C/C++), 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 Systems Engineer (C/C++), Exchange Core as described in the posting:
Polymarket is looking for a core C/C++ engineer to help build and scale our exchange infrastructure. This is a low-latency, high-throughput systems role focused on the heart of Polymarket’s trading engine.
You’ll operate with high ownership and minimal bureaucracy, collaborating closely with other senior engineers to design, implement, and optimize systems that must be correct, fast, and resilient under real-world load.
What you’ll do
Day-to-day scope for the Senior Systems Engineer (C/C++), Exchange Core as described in the posting:
We’re looking for an experienced individual contributor who enjoys solving hard systems problems and pushing performance limits.
- Build the exchange core: Design and implement low-latency, high-throughput components of Polymarket’s trading and matching infrastructure using C/C++.
- Optimize for speed & scale: Profile, tune, and debug performance-critical systems, with a relentless focus on latency, throughput, and determinism.
- Design robust systems: Develop efficient algorithms and data structures, and build scalable messaging and event-driven systems (e.g. Kafka or similar).
- Own reliability & correctness: Reinforce the security, availability, performance, and scalability of core exchange systems through careful design, testing, and operational rigor.
- Collaborate deeply: Work closely with engineers across product, infra, and data to ensure tight integration between the exchange and the rest of the platform.
- Contribute to engineering excellence: Participate in design reviews, code reviews, and architectural discussions to maintain a high bar for quality across the codebase.
What we’re looking for
- 5+ years of professional C/C++ experience with deep knowledge of algorithms, data structures, and low-level performance optimization.
- Proven experience building or operating low-latency, high-throughput, scalable systems in production environments.
- Strong problem-solving skills, comfort working on complex systems end-to-end, and an entrepreneurial mindset.
- (Plus) Background in finance, trading systems, networking, or exchange infrastructure
- (Plus) Experience with multithreading, lock-free programming, and advanced optimization techniques
- (Plus) Familiarity with distributed messaging systems (Kafka or similar)
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 Systems Engineer (C/C++), 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.