Senior Backend Engineer, Trading & Connectivity at Polymarket
New York, NY
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Jul 23, 2026
New York, NY
Jul 25, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior/staff backend engineering role focused on the infrastructure that connects a prediction market exchange to the outside world — covering market data distribution, order routing, and high-throughput event pipelines built on technologies such as Kafka, gRPC, and DynamoDB/Redis. The position involves both hands-on system design and technical leadership, including mentoring and hiring. It suits an experienced distributed-systems engineer comfortable with low-latency, mission-critical production environments.
Staff level · 8+ years · Remote · Full-time
Advertised as Senior, but the requirements read as Staff.
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 6,100 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 3,650–9,100
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
The title reads 'senior/staff backend engineer' — advertised seniority is taken as Senior (the lower of the two named levels). However, the actual requirements — 8+ years, architecting high-throughput distributed systems, technical leadership including mentoring and hiring, and org-wide connectivity ownership — support a Staff-level classification.
No work location is specified in the posting; the role appears fully remote based on the absence of any office or city requirement.
Compensation is described only as 'competitive salary & equity' with no figures given.
DynamoDB and Redis are listed together as a paired technology choice ('DynamoDB/Redis'); emitted as one skill with Redis as an alternative.
gRPC and Protobuf are both named in the posting: gRPC appears in the required qualifications section and is marked required; Protobuf appears only in the '(Plus)' preferred section alongside gRPC and is marked preferred.
Trading systems / HFT experience and cloud deployment (AWS/GCP) are explicitly flagged as '(Plus)' items and are marked preferred accordingly.
Read the full posting
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