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.

Core 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 (background in Java or Python is acceptable)
• High standards for data quality with careful attention to correctness, deduplication, and consistency
• Solid understanding of full-text search systems including indexing strategy, relevance tuning, and query optimization
• Proficiency in building reliable REST APIs

Useful Additional 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