Carica papaya (papaya) is an economically important tropical fruit. Molecular marker-assisted selection is an inexpensive and reliable tool that has been widely used to improve fruit quality traits and resistance against diseases. In the present study we report the development and validation of an atlas of papaya simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers. We integrated gene predictions and functional annotations to provide a gene-centered perspective for marker-assisted selection studies. Our atlas comprises 160,318 SSRs, from which 21,231 were located in genic regions (i.e. inside exons, exon-intron junctions or introns). A total of 116,453 (72.6%) of all identified repeats were successfully mapped to one of the nine papaya linkage groups. Primer pairs were designed for markers from 9,594 genes (34.5% of the papaya gene complement). Using papaya-tomato orthology assessments, we assembled a list of 300 genes (comprising 785 SSRs) potentially involved in fruit ripening. We validated our atlas by screening 73 SSR markers (including 25 fruit ripening genes), achieving 100% amplification rate and uncovering 26% polymorphism rate between the parental genotypes (Sekati and JS12). The SSR atlas presented here is the first comprehensive gene-centered collection of annotated and genome positioned papaya SSRs. These features combined with thousands of high-quality primer pairs make the atlas an important resource for the papaya research community.