Senior Backend Engineer – Data, Search, Infrastructure

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Austria.

📋 Description

• Paperpile operates on a large scale, managing a literature database that exceeds 250 million academic papers, alongside a growing repository of user data accumulated over more than a decade. You will be involved in the systems that ingest, process, store, and reliably serve this data: constructing pipelines, enhancing search capabilities, managing PDFs at scale, and providing clean APIs.

⛳️ Requirements

• **Robust backend engineering expertise** with a track record of building and maintaining **data-intensive systems** in a production environment.

• Experience in deploying and managing services on **AWS**.

• Proven ability in designing and sustaining **data ingestion pipelines** that deal with messy and diverse sources. Proficient in web scraping and interacting with third-party data sources and APIs.

• Familiarity with **Node.js and TypeScript**. It's acceptable if your background is in Java or Python, as long as you are comfortable working within this ecosystem.

• High expectations for **data quality**. You meticulously consider correctness, deduplication, and consistency.

• Strong grasp of **full-text search systems**, including indexing strategies, relevance tuning, and query optimization.

• Skilled in developing dependable **REST APIs**.

• **Additional beneficial experience:**

• Knowledge of academic publishing formats and data sources (such as PubMed, Crossref, arXiv…).

• Experience with PDF processing pipelines (including extraction, transformation, storage, and delivery at scale).

• Familiarity with LLM-based document processing or machine learning pipelines for extracting structured data from unstructured text.

• Experience in large-scale web crawling and scraping.

🏝️ Benefits

• Base salary **€60,000–€90,000** depending on your level of experience.

• Bonus/equity program.

• 4 weeks of paid vacation plus local holidays.

• We provide sponsorship for co-working spaces in your city.

• Opportunities for learning and growth. Experiment with new ideas. We support relevant courses, seminars, and conferences.