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 scra