Backend Engineer

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.

Compensation

• Base compensation €60,000–€90,000 based on the level of your experience
• Bonus/equity program.