Senior Backend Engineer, Exchange Systems

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.

• •**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.

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

• •Production experience building low-latency backend systems at scale
• •Strong concurrency skills and a track record debugging lock contention, race conditions, and async correctness issues
• •Fluency in production Go and Rust
• •Deep observability experience: pprof, metrics, logs, and distributed traces
• •Experience with exchange systems that interact with EVM or blockchain settlement layers
• •Strong computer science fundamentals: algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and profiling
• •(Plus) Direct experience with matching engines or exchange infrastructure
• •(Plus) EVM transaction lifecycle experience: confirmations, reorgs, and how on-chain state affects off-chain systems
• •(Plus) Go runtime and GC tuning experience
• •(Plus) Experience with Redis, PostgreSQL, gRPC, and Protobuf
• •(Plus) Kubernetes and AWS production operations experience