Backend Engineer

Nearly $900B is spent on recruiting every year and the process is still broken. 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. THE ROLE 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. WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON The backend is where Paraform's hardest engineering problems live. You'll be working on: - Performance and data: Optimize Postgres and the service layer to keep the platform fast as we grow. - Backend services: Own and extend the services that power matching, recruiter workflows, payments, and marketplace operations. - Integrations: Build and maintain integrations across the systems recruiters and hiring managers live in. - Infrastructure and CI/CD: 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. - Auth and security: Strengthen authentication, access control, and data protection across the platform. - Internal AI tooling: Build the tools and infrastructure that let our team use AI effectively in their day-to-day work. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 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 WHY THIS ROLE The backend at Paraform is the foundation everything else is built on, and there's more to do here than any one person can get to. You'll have the autonomy to pick the problems that matter most and the room to fix them properly. If you want to work on hard backend problems that shape how companies build their teams and how thousands of people find their next role, this is the job for you. ABOUT PARAFORM: Paraform is a marketplace modernizing one of the largest and most fragmented markets in the world: hiring. We partner with industry leaders like Cursor, Palantir, Windsurf, Decagon, Shopify, Coinbase, and Hightouch to hire world-class talent, and are growing quickly - 8×-ing revenue last year. Paraform is the first end-to-end AI recruiting marketplace that connects companies with thousands of specialized recruiters and AI agents that work together to fill roles faster and more accurately. Our mission is to make hiring fast, reliable, and scalable for every company in the world. At Paraform, we believe recruiting works best when the right people are working on the right problems, combining human judgment with AI that truly understands hiring. That’s why we’re building a new foundation for how companies hire, bringing t