Senior Backend Engineer, Exchange Systems

Polymarket

Senior Backend Engineer focused on enhancing exchange systems for Polymarket, the largest prediction market platform. Involves hands-on experience with high-throughput trading backends and critical path ownership.

Posted 7/28/2026full-timeRemote • New York • 🇺🇸 United StatesSeniorWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

Use this summary to align your resume positioning with the role.

Demonstrates deep expertise in Go programming, with a focus on optimizing performance and handling concurrency in high-throughput exchange systems. Proficient in debugging production incidents and ensuring system correctness while managing settlement risks in a trading environment.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Deep Go ExpertiseConcurrency SkillsProfiling ExperienceEVM/Blockchain Transaction Lifecycle ExperienceProduction Ownership of Exchange Systems

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills

Matching EnginesOrder RoutingAlgorithmsData StructuresSystems-Level Thinking

Tools & Technologies

PprofFlamegraphsRedisPostgreSQLGRPCProtobufKubernetesAWS

Industry Keywords

High-Throughput TradingOn-Chain SettlementTail LatencyRollback SafetyConcurrency Issues

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSGoGRPCKubernetesPostgresRedisRust

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Own the CLOB engine's critical path. Profile matching and orderbook hot paths, map settlement-sensitive state transitions, and drive improvements to latency, throughput, and async engine flow backed by benchmarks and production-grade evidence.
Reduce lock contention without breaking correctness. Debug concurrency issues, design safer queueing and backpressure for orderbooks, and improve the system's ability to handle materially more markets and order flow with lower tail latency.
Build for observability and safety. Instrument improvements with pprof, metrics, logs, and traces. Establish rollback guarantees and narrower critical paths that make production incidents easier to detect, diagnose, and resolve.
Reason about settlement risk. Understand how on-chain transaction effects ripple into off-chain exchange state, and design systems that handle crossed books, ghost fills, stale orders, cancel inconsistencies, and settlement edge cases correctly.
Improve the runtime. Reduce GC pressure, optimize CPU and memory allocation behavior, and push Go runtime performance to meet the demands of a high-throughput exchange at scale.
Debug production incidents. Own latency, correctness, and settlement-state incidents end-to-end, and drive follow-through that leaves the system measurably better each time.

Requirements

What you’ll need

Senior+ backend or systems engineer with production ownership of an exchange system — perp DEX, crypto exchange, or any high-throughput trading backend with on-chain settlement
Hands-on experience with matching engines, order routing, or market data infrastructure where tail latency, correctness, and rollback safety were real constraints
Deep Go expertise — you've tuned GC pressure, optimized hot paths, and understand the runtime internals that matter in a high-throughput exchange context
Strong concurrency skills with a real track record: lock contention, race conditions, async correctness, and backpressure under load
Profiling experience you've actually used in production — pprof, flamegraphs, and metrics to find and fix latency problems, not just describe them
EVM/blockchain transaction lifecycle experience: you understand how confirmations, reorgs, and on-chain state ripple into off-chain exchange correctness
Strong CS fundamentals: algorithms, data structures, and systems-level thinking
(Plus) Rust experience
(Plus) Redis, PostgreSQL, gRPC, Protobuf
(Plus) Kubernetes and AWS production operations

Benefits

Comp & perks

Competitive salary & equity
Unlimited PTO
Full Health, Vision, & Dental coverage
401k match
Hardware setup: new MacBook Pro, big display, & accessories