Senior Backend Engineer, Perpetuals

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 launching perpetual futures and we're looking for Senior Backend Engineers to own the core systems that make it run. This is backend exchange engineering in the truest sense: low-latency order matching, high-throughput order state management, and the infrastructure that keeps an exchange operating correctly under load. Ownership here is real and broad. We're looking for engineers who have built and operated order-book-based exchange systems before and can step in with deep context, take meaningful ownership of critical backend components, and raise the reliability and performance of the platform as we scale. If you've worked on the backend of a serious exchange and want to do it again somewhere with momentum, this is the role. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own core exchange backend systems. Take deep ownership of the systems that power order matching, position management, and order state across perpetual futures. - Build and optimize the matching engine. Profile hot paths, reduce lock contention, and drive improvements to latency and throughput backed by benchmarks and production-grade evidence. - Design for correctness at scale. Build queueing and backpressure mechanisms that keep the orderbook consistent and reliable under high load, without crossing books, creating ghost fills, or introducing stale order state. - Build for observability. Instrument systems with metrics, logs, and traces. Establish rollback guarantees and narrow critical paths that make production incidents faster to detect, diagnose, and resolve. - Improve runtime performance. Optimize CPU, memory, and allocation behavior to meet the demands of a high-throughput exchange in production. - Own production incidents end-to-end. Debug latency and correctness issues directly, and drive follow-through that leaves the system measurably better each time. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - Senior backend engineering experience with a strong background in order-book-based exchange systems - Deep knowledge of low-latency systems: concurrency, lock contention, async correctness, and performance profiling - Experience with matching engines, order state management, or similar exchange infrastructure - Comfort working in Rust or a strong willingness to work in it — enthusiasm for the language is a plus, resistance to it is a red flag - Strong observability fundamentals: metrics, logs, distributed traces, and profiling tools - Strong computer science fundamentals: algorithms, data structures, and systems design - (Plus) Experience with high-frequency or low-latency trading infrastructure - (Plus) Familiarity with Redis, PostgreSQL, gRPC, and Protobuf - (Plus) Kubernetes and AWS production operations experience BENEFITS - Competitive salary & equity - Unlimited PTO - Full Health, Vision, & Dental coverage - 401k match - Hardware setup: new MacBook Pro, big display, & accessories