Backend Engineer

Paraform • San Francisco, CA

2d • $140,000 - $290,000

About The Position

Paraform is building the global talent infrastructure where companies come to fill their most critical roles. Through every search, placement, and interaction on our platform, we capture proprietary hiring data that no one else has at scale, and that data powers the agentic systems we're building to make hiring faster, smarter, and more precise. We believe AI will create more jobs, not less. As companies move faster with fewer constraints, they'll hire more ambitiously and for roles that didn't exist before, making the hiring layer more critical than ever.

We have 15 engineers and $80M in ARR. That ratio is intentional. Every engineer at Paraform plays a massive role in shaping the direction of the business.

We're hiring a Backend Engineer to own the systems that everything else at Paraform runs on. A strong backend is what lets us move fast, ship reliably, and build the kind of product that candidates, hiring managers, and recruiters can actually depend on. The work is critical to the evolution of our product and business. The systems you build will directly shape what the product can do, how users experience it, and how quickly the rest of the team can ship. You'll own the full backend surface area and the decisions that come with it.

Requirements

• Deep backend expertise: You're fluent in backend systems, databases, and the tradeoffs that come with running production infrastructure
• Pragmatic: You know when to optimize, when to rewrite, and when to leave it alone. You make decisions based on impact, not novelty
• Operationally minded: You care about what happens after the code ships. Observability, reliability, and on-call experience are part of the job, not an afterthought
• High ownership: You see a problem in the system and go fix it without waiting to be asked

Responsibilities

• Optimize Postgres and the service layer to keep the platform fast as we grow.
• Own and extend the services that power matching, recruiter workflows, payments, and marketplace operations.
• Build and maintain integrations across the systems recruiters and hiring managers live in.
• Run the infra and pipelines that ship and operate Paraform.
• Improve observability, harden deploys, and make the system easier for the team to work in.
• Strengthen authentication, access control, and data protection across the platform.
• Build the tools and infrastructure that let our team use AI effectively in their day-to-day work.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed