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.

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.