Lead Web Engineer, Performance

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 Polymarket is looking for a Lead Web Engineer, Performance to own the speed, efficiency, and scalability of our web platform. You'll set the direction for web performance at Polymarket, establish the standards and systems that keep the product fast at scale, and shape how Polymarket thinks about performance as a discipline. We're looking for someone who has operated at serious scale (billions of page loads) and knows what it takes to make a high-traffic web product fast for every user, everywhere. You'll come in with deep technical conviction and lay the foundation for a world-class web performance practice. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Take responsibility for load times, rendering performance, and runtime efficiency across Polymarket's web platform, with measurable targets and a clear plan to hit them - Define the architecture, standards, and tooling that govern how Polymarket approaches performance — caching strategy, rendering pipeline, bundle discipline, and edge delivery - Identify and eliminate bottlenecks in how pages load and render, including server-side rendering, hydration, code splitting, lazy loading, and asset delivery - Design and maintain caching architectures at every layer (browser, CDN, and edge) to minimize latency and maximize cache hit rates at scale - Instrument real user monitoring, Core Web Vitals tracking, and synthetic testing so the team has continuous, actionable visibility into performance regressions - Establish benchmarks, budgets, and standards that keep performance a first-class concern as the product and engineering team grow WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - Deep experience in web performance engineering at significant scale — you've worked on systems serving billions of page loads and know what breaks at that level - Strong expertise across the web performance stack: rendering, caching, CDN configuration, bundle optimization, and Core Web Vitals - Proficiency in JavaScript and TypeScript, with a strong understanding of how browser engines, the V8 runtime, and the network layer interact - Experience with real user monitoring, synthetic performance testing, and building observability systems that surface regressions before users feel them - A rigorous, measurement-driven approach — you don't guess at performance problems, you profile, instrument, and prove them - Technical leadership experience — you've set direction, raised the bar across a codebase, and influenced how a broader engineering team thinks about performance - (Plus) Experience with Next.js, React, and modern SSR/SSG rendering strategies at scale - (Plus) Familiarity with edge computing, worker runtimes, or CDN-level programmability BENEFITS - Competitive salary & equity - Unlimited PTO - Full Health, Vision, & Dental coverage - 401k match - Hardware setup: new MacBook Pro, big display, & accessories