Backend Engineer

About the Role

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 (experience in Java or Python is also acceptable).
• High standards for data quality, including 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.

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.

Required Skills