Backend Engineer, Markets

Job description

About Polymarket 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. About the Role The Markets Engineering team owns the infrastructure that keeps thousands of live markets accurate, up-to-date, and resolving correctly in real time — automation pipelines, external data integrations, and lifecycle systems that run continuously across a catalog spanning politics, sports, economics, and breaking news. When this layer works well, traders trust the platform. When it doesn't, markets go stale, resolution breaks, and confidence erodes fast. We're hiring an early-career backend engineer to join the Markets automation team and own meaningful pieces of this infrastructure from day one. You'll work alongside senior engineers, but this is not a support role — you'll own well-scoped pipelines end-to-end, ship to production within your first few weeks, and take on broader ownership as you grow. The problems are concrete, the feedback loops are short, and the stakes are real. What You'll Do - Build and maintain automation pipelines that handle market creation, parameter configuration, and lifecycle updates across thousands of concurrent markets - Integrate sports APIs, news feeds, and other external data sources that drive market creation and resolution, including handling the messy, inconsistent data that comes with real vendors - Design pipelines for reliability, idempotency, safe re-runs, and fast failure detection through monitoring and alerting - Contribute to the data-driven systems that resolve markets accurately and on time - Debug production failures across markets infrastructure, often under time pressure, with senior support available - Review code and participate in design discussions as a full member of the engineering team What We're Looking For - 1–4 years of professional backend engineering experience, or equivalent evidence such as strong internships combined with serious personal projects - Proficiency in TypeScript, Python, or Go — genuinely strong in at least one and able to move in the others - Hands-on experience integrating third-party APIs and working with real-world data that is inconsistent, delayed, or poorly documented - Evidence that you ship: a production job, public repositories with real code, or personal projects that are actually running - Comfort with AI-native development tools such as Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor — this is part of how we work, not optional - Ownership mindset — you want to run what you build and you care when things break - Comfort on Linux and with cloud tooling, or a clear track record of picking up new infrastructure quickly - (Plus) Personal projects built on Polymarket, Kalshi, or other prediction market APIs - (Plus) Exposure to queues, streaming systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ), or workflow engines - (Plus) Genuine interest in prediction markets, sports, or trading Benefits - Competitive salary & equity - Unlimited PTO - Full Health, Vision, & Dental coverage - 401k match - Hardware setup: new MacBook Pro, big display, & accessories