Senior Backend Engineer (Data, Search, Infrastructure)

Paperpile runs on data at scale, with a literature database of 250M+ academic papers and a growing body of user data accumulated over more than a decade. You’ll work across the systems that ingest, process, store, and serve this data reliably: building pipelines, optimizing search, handling PDFs at scale, and exposing clean APIs. Requirements – Strong backend engineering background with experience building and operating data-heavy systems in production. – Experience deploying and operating services on AWS. – Experience designing and maintaining data ingestion pipelines handling messy, heterogeneous sources. Comfortable with web scraping and working with third-party data sources and APIs. – Familiarity with Node.js and TypeScript. It’s fine if you come from a different background, such as Java or Python, but you should be comfortable working in this environment. – High standards for data quality. You think carefully about correctness, deduplication, and consistency. – Solid understanding of full-text search systems including indexing strategy, relevance tuning, and query optimization. – Proficient in building reliable REST APIs. More useful experience – Familiarity with academic publishing formats and data sources (PubMed, Crossref, arXiv…) – Experience with PDF processing pipelines (extraction, transformation, storage and delivery at scale). – Experience with LLM-based document processing or ML pipelines for extracting structured data from unstructured text. – Large scale web crawling and scraping. Benefits – Base compensation €60,000–€90,000 based on the level of your experience – Bonus/equity program. – 4 weeks paid vacation + local holidays. – We sponsor co-working space in your city. – Learn and grow. Try out new things. We sponsor relevant courses, seminars, and conferences.